When Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut were first asked to write a history of Newark’s Beth Israel hospital, they wanted to turn down the offer.

“One day the phone rang and it was Warren Grover, then president of the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest,” said Alan Kraut, a professor of history at American University in Washington, DC. “He said JHS was looking for someone to write the history of Newark Beth Israel, and my first inclination was to say ‘no.’

“But the more I thought about it, and the more Debbie and I talked about it, the more it became an intriguing proposition.”

What made the offer so inviting was a treasure trove of source material — minutes of board meetings, vintage photographs, and myriad stories in secular and Jewish newspapers about the pioneering influence of the hospital.

But the couple — Deborah is a writer on health care and other issues — also saw an opportunity to write a story much broader than one hospital’s history. It was to become a sweeping look at the rise of Jewish hospitals and how an institution founded to alleviate the challenges to one ethnic group grew to serve a community at large.

The result of six years of research and writing is Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America, published last month by Rutgers University Press

The book was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Healthcare Foundation — established with assets from the sale of Beth Israel Hospital in 1985 — and a major assist from the JHS.

The work tells of hospitals founded under Jewish auspices in large part as a response to anti-Semitism, but whose leaders vowed to provide quality healthcare to all.

“Many say they began to avoid discrimination, against doctors and against patients, and that’s certainly true,” Alan Kraut told NJ Jewish News in a Jan. 31 telephone interview from his Bethesda, Md., home. “But the Jews who founded these places were enormously proud of what they had done, because they saw themselves as contributing to the betterment of the entire community.”

Beth Israel began as a 21-bed facility that opened in 1901 on the corner of West Kinney and High Streets in Newark.

From the start, Essex County’s Jews took as much pride in saying they were “born at the Beth” as WASPs who said their ancestors “came over on the Mayflower.”

“What is fascinating is the role the concept of ‘born at the Beth’ played when the hospital nearly went bankrupt” during the Depression, said Deborah.

The enterprising response to the crisis — inspired by pride in the institution — was that women in the community opened a gift shop and later a tea room on the premises as money-makers to aid the cash-strapped hospital.

Even earlier, fund-raisers launched a $1.5 million capital campaign with a full-page print ad in Der Tag, a local Yiddish newspaper. It featured “Miss Beth,” the likeness of a registered nurse, carrying the model of a modern hospital on a tray, in an appeal to newly arrived immigrants from Eastern European not yet fluent in English.

Replete with local anecdotes alongside national history, the 305-page Covenant of Care contains a detailed index and a voluminous list of American-Jewish hospitals.

It “took longer than it should have to write,” said Alan.

As the key researcher on a project that ran from 1999 to 2005, Deborah said she didn’t have to struggle to find sources.

“For the Beth, it was real easy. Whatever we found from other sources, I could say to Alan, ‘I can verify it. It is there in the ledgers.’”

But she still longed for documents from the hospital’s earliest days, documents she assumed were no longer in existence — until she paid a visit to JHS on the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany.

Dr. Victor Parsonnet — the grandson and namesake of one of the hospital’s founders and original staff members — happened to be walking into the JHS when Deborah was there on a research visit.

“Victor had inherited and held onto the hospital’s original ledger containing the minutes of the first board meetings,” said Deborah. “They told of how the Beth was founded, who participated, what were some of the pitfalls, what were some of the requirements the doctors felt they had to accomplish in order to build a first- rate hospital.”

It was a “eureka” moment for her. “My God, I had been waiting since we started this book to find this. We wanted to get the story right.”

“All life is in timing,” said JHS curator and outreach director Linda Forgosh.

It took until after World War II for Jews to overcome the restrictive quotas in place for those seeking admission to medical school and places on hospital staffs. The Beth was also a pioneer in accepting African-American physicians.

“This was not so much a commitment to integrate as it was to hire the best people,” said Alan. “As I went over the minutes of board meetings, I wondered whether they had discussions over the subject of racial integration. There were no discussions because it wasn’t an issue.”

As the Krauts embark on a multistate book tour — they will appear at a reception at the Gebroe and Hammer Conference Center at the Aidekman campus at 7 p.m. on May 15 — they view its publication as timely.

“The country is beginning a big debate about how to bring health care to people who don’t have access to it,” said Alan. “This book tells the story in many ways of how an earlier generation handled that problem.

“We are in the middle of a great wave of immigration now, and it has raised all kinds of questions about providing culturally sensitive health care. Here is an example of a community that provided culturally sensitive health care to those who needed it the most.”