Nearly 100 people, more than half from Armenian churches in Southern California, gathered in Solvang to honor a Danish woman credited with saving thousands of children from genocide.

The crowd gathered in the Bethania Lutheran Church garden, where a bust of missionary Maria Jacobsen, with a brass plaque, was unveiled and dedicated.

Overhead a banner read, “Thank you, Maria ‘Mama’ Jacobsen and people of Denmark. Always grateful — your Armenian friends,” reported the Santa Ynez Valley News.

Moved by the plight of Armenian orphans in the years of Armenian Genocide, Jacobsen left her home in Denmark and traveled to the Ottoman Empire, where she helped the wounded and ill and worked to save orphaned children.

 

She, along with other Danish missionaries who joined her, is credited with saving 4,000 orphans, and she adopted three orphaned children.

In 1922, Jacobsen moved many of the children to an orphanage she established near Beirut, Lebanon. She was buried there following her death in 1960.

Jacobsen is affectionately known today by the Armenian people as “Mayrik” (Mama, in Armenian)

Maria Jacobsen was a witness of the physical extermination of the Armenians.