'Orphan Doctor' Jane Aronson Speaks at Sharey Tefilo Israel Tonight

Her Maplewood-based Worldwide Orphans Foundation—which has an office on Valley Street—has been in existence for 11 years and has eight employees (not to mention the hundreds in foreign countries) and an operating budget of $3 million. Its programs are currently focused on Ethiopia, Vietnam, Serbia, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan.

The foundation gets funding from private donors but also from corporate sponsors including the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation as well as PEPFAR, which administers federal funds to combat the global HIV/AIDS crisis.

"Our new mission is really the integrity of the family—we’re serving orphans, but we’re also preventing orphans by bringing the families into secure care," said Dr. Aronson, 57, a Maplewood resident who's the adoptive mother of two children—11-year-old Des from Ethiopia and 8-year-old Benjamin from Vietnam. She estimates that the foundation helps thousands of children per year, and sites for projects—including AIDS treatment programs administering antiretroviral drugs in Ethiopia and Vietnam, sports and early intervention programs—are scouted out through her network of contacts.

Dr. Aronson's practice focuses on caring for children adopted from abroad and tending to their needs, but through her travels abroad, she became focused on improving orphans' lives in their countries of birth. It seemed like an urgent priority in light of the statistics: about 145 million children world-wide are living without parental care, and the number of orphans adopted by foreign parents is limited and dwindling in light of restrictions placed on foreign adoptions by some countries in the early part of this decade.

Originally from Long Island, Dr. Aronson entered medical school at age 31 after teaching school for 10 years and has been practicing adoption medicine for 17 years.

The talk is $25 for members of the Sharey Tefilo Israel congregation and $30 for non-members.