Jaffa (Adele Solomons and Myer E.) family papers, 1880-1968

Adele Solomons was born in San Francisco on November 7, 1868, the daughter of Seixus and Hannah Marks Solomons. She received an M.D. in homeopathy from Hahnemann Medical College of the Pacific. She married Myer Edward Jaffa, who was born in Sydney, Australia in 1857 and immigrated to California with his family in the mid 1860s. Dr. Adele Solomons Jaffa was a physician, lecturer in dietetics at UC Berkeley between 1912 and 1914, and child psychiatrist (on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute of Child Welfare at UC Berkeley between 1928 and 1935). She developed the California Preschool Mental Scale. Her interest in and enthusiasm for diagnosis of emotional and psychological problems in children led her to enter private practice as the “Play Doctor” in the offices of William Palmer Lucas in San Francisco, where she remained from 1934 until her retirement in 1952. Myer E. Jaffa was an agricultural chemist, professor of nutrition at the University of California, and first director of the California Bureau of Food and Drugs. He was an early advocate of pure food and drug laws for human and domestic animal consumption, and was associated with the movement which resulted in passage of the federal food and drug laws.

The collection includes biographies; a few professional papers by Adele Solomons Jaffa; clippings; and photographs. The photographs include an 1893 portrait of Adele Solomons at her graduation from Hahnemann Medical College of the Pacific, a 1902 portrait of Adele Solomons Jaffa with her children, Edward and Aileen, a portrait of Myer E. Jaffa, a photograph of the interior of Madame Rabe Jaffa’s home on Bush Street in San Francisco (circa 1880), and a photograph of Sarah and Michael Stein at the marriage of their son Allan to Yvonne Daunt in Paris in 1922 (also pictured are Yvonne Daunt and her mother). The collection also includes minutes (handwritten and typed) and a membership list for the California-based Committee for the Advance of Agricultural Research in Palestine, which was founded in 1934 and for which Aileen Jaffa Katzky (a poet and artist who was the head librarian of the Agricultural Library at the University of California, Berkeley) was secretary, and a copy of “Hither and Thither in California,” a report of a trip around California organized by Myer E. Jaffa for the attendees of the 1899 annual convention of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations and the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists.