I CLOSE-UP
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*Orphan
Immigrants
LINDA BENSON
Special to The Jewish News
Illustration by Bob Lynch
24
FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 1991
here do babies come from? For
several Detroit-area families, the
age-old question has some exotic
new variations these days.
Mark Feinberg, 61/2, and his sister Rachel,
1 1/2, of Ann Arbor came from Bogota, Col-
umbia. Their parents, Andrew and Isabelle
Huron Feinberg, have traveled twice to
Bogota, staying the first time for
six weeks, the second time for 10
days, to escort them to their new
family and home from their
first residence, a Columbian
orphanage.
Douglas Shore, 8 months old,
of Novi, first met his parents,
Helen and David Shore, in an
emotion-packed union at Detroit
Metropolitan Airport. Four
months old at the time, Douglas was one
of five infants on board a Northwest flight,
all traveling from orphanages near Seoul,
Korea, to be adopted by American families.
Twins Mirjana and Milan Kulis, 1 year
'old, of Birmingham, came last November
from Timosoaria, Romania, a provincial
capital near the Hungarian border. The
smaller twin, Mirjana, was so sickly and
frail and the orphanage so poorly supplied
that her mother, Dorothy Kulis, bought am-
picillin and Tylenol from the trunk of a
black marketeer at the Romanian-
Hungarian border so Mirjana would be
healthy enough to make the plane trip to
Michigan.
The Shores, the Feinbergs and the
Kulises are a part of a steadily growing
number of couples in the greater Detroit
area who have been looking to faraway
places such as Korea, Columbia, El
Salvador, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Paraguay,
Chile, Peru, India, the Philippines, and
most recently, Romania and Bulgaria, for
adoptable infants. And they have been fin-
ding them.
The Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) calls children that enter the
United States for adoption by Americans
"orphan immigrants." Over the past 20
years, the "orphan immigrants" have swell-
ed as the number of adoptable American-
born, Caucasian infants has dramatically
contracted.
Since 1970, adoptions of American-born
children has plunged by more than 40 per-
cent, from 89,000 to about 50,000 in 1988,
according to estimates from a private
Washington-based group, the National
Committee for Adoption (NCA). These do
not include stepchild adoptions, usually the
result of divorce and remarriage. Between
1982 and 1984, the NCA reports, the
number of foreign-born children adopted in
Michigan swelled by more than 60 percent,
from 359 to 580. It was the third highest
increase in the nation.
"There simply are no white infants
available for adoption in this community,"
says Ellie Falit, juvenile court caseworker