For over half a century, Institut Ascher in the Swiss town of Bex-les-Bains was the first Orthodox stop for hundreds of children

For many decades, the quiet town of Bex-les-Bains was more than just a pastoral Swiss village: This little town was actually a pulsating center of Jewish education. From 1905 to 1978, hundreds of families sent their children to the Ascher Institute (“Institut Ascher”) in Bex-les-Bains, confident that it would give them a good start in life. They came from Iran and Hungary, Los Angeles and Bolivia, some to benefit from the fresh, healthy air, others for the sake of the Jewish education unavailable in their hometowns. For many children, it was their first exposure to Orthodox Judaism in practice. But was it really possible to cater to such a varied clientele, and for children to thrive far from their parents and homes in this now-vanished educational world? Under the skilled hands of the Swiss-bred Ascher family, the answer was, amazingly, yes.

Mr. Tommy Moskovics, banker and communal leader in the kehillah of Vienna,, who spent seven years there in the 1950s, remembers Institut Ascher — which at the time housed 120 children of roughly 50 nationalities — as a kind of United Nations: There was a boy from Alexandria, Egypt, two or three children from Istanbul, a girl from Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Iraqi brothers who came via Italy. There were Iranians, Israeli Sephardi children, British and American children, some children of Polish and Hungarian war survivors, and a few local Swiss children as well.

During the post-war decade when the world was in tatters, this Orthodox boarding school provided an island of stability — an option for parents who needed to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. Switzerland had remained neutral, but the rest of Europe was war-scarred to its foundations, its Jewish communities decimated. Having lost their extended families and the entire basis of their economic and community standing, survivor parents didn’t always have the resources to raise and educate their children, or had no suitable educational facilities in the places they found themselves. Mr. Moskovics arrived in Bex (pronounced Bey) in 1952 from Austria when he was six, and stayed there until 1959.

“I was born in the aftermath of the war, and some of the other children were born at the war’s end,” says Mr. Moskovics. “Our parents needed to find themselves in the world, and if they could find the money for our schooling at Ascher’s, that was a good thing.”