The FounderRabbi Naftali Rosenfeld z"l, founder of the home. He led it from 1949 until his passing.— The Story of a Door That Has Never ClosedOne home. Hundreds of girls.
One home. Hundreds of girls.
Held, every day, by thousands of partners.
Bayit Lepleitot began in 1949, when Rabbi Naftali Rosenfeld z"l - a Holocaust survivor who had lost his wife and four daughters - opened his Jerusalem home to twenty-four orphaned girls. Today, hundreds of girls grow up within its walls - and the home stands for one reason only: thousands of partners, from the philanthropist who carries a whole wing to the family that sets aside a few dollars a month, have never let go of its door. This is the story of the home - and of everyone who holds it.
— About the founder
Before there was a home, there was a man.
Rabbi Naftali Rosenfeld was born in Hungary at the start of the twentieth century. He came of age in a world of Yeshivot, Shabbos tables, and a family he would later have to count among the ones lost to the Shoah. His first wife and four daughters did not survive.
He arrived in Jerusalem in the late 1940s with the kind of grief that does not ask to be soothed - only to be made useful. He remarried. He took a small flat in Mea Shearim. And he started noticing what was around him: girls who had survived, girls who could no longer remember a parent's face, girls who slept in stairwells.
He did not start an institution. He started by opening a door. Twenty-four girls came through it in the first year. By the end of his thirty-five years of leadership, hundreds more had followed. The promise he made in 1949 - that any girl who arrived at Bayit Lepleitot would know she had found a home - was not a slogan. It was the structure he built the rest of his life around.
His son took over in 1985. His grandson took over in 2024. The promise has not been edited.
“Every girl who arrives at Bayit Lepleitot will know that, here, she has found a home.- Rabbi Naftali Rosenfeld · The founding promise · 1949
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