Historical society to remember glory days of Beth Israel

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Five months before its opening night, curator Linda Forgosh spends long workdays poring over faded photographs and yellowing ledger books, preparing for a Jewish Historical Society exhibition on the Beth Israel Medical Center.The two-month exhibit from September to November will focus on an institution whose influence extends far beyond the precincts of MetroWest.“It is not just about Newark Beth Israel but about the Jewish hospitals in America — where we fit into the scheme of things and why such a thing was necessary,” said Forgosh, as she dug deep into the JHS climate-controlled vault at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany.The long success story of “the Beth” will be told with photographs and documents, 43 years worth of minutes from trustees’ meetings and what Forgosh calls “the shoebox collections of people whose lives were impacted by the Beth.” Like other institutions in the network of Jewish hospitals built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Beth Israel had its roots in the anti-Semitism of the day. The hospitals gave Jewish doctors a place to train and work and it gave observant patients the food and special care they needed.Beth Israel’s first incarnation was a 21-bed facility that opened in 1901 on the corner of West Kinney and High Streets, and if members of an eager community could not afford to support it financially “they gave donations in-kind — like a Mrs. Karlinsky, who gave one jar of chicken fat for patient care,” said Forgosh. The Beth began with a medical staff of just eight doctors. “They had a combined total of 20 years of medical experience,” said Forgosh. Along with the first team of physicians was a nursing staff, a nursing school, a one-chair dental clinic, and “an awful lot of help from the ladies” who formed what was actually called the Sewing Circle. Members were doctors’ wives and “other women in the Jewish community who were probably a little more affluent,” who volunteered to sew bandages and linens and did the fund-raising. Within seven years, the hospital became overcrowded and outdated. In 1908 it was razed and replaced with a state-of-the-art 80-bed hospital.The Beth’s second home lasted until 1928, when a larger facility opened on Lyons Avenue, where the current medical center now stands.

After the crash

Felix Fuld and Louis Bamberger, the brothers-in-law who founded Bamberger’s Department Store on Market Street, were the hospital’s biggest financial angels, with Fuld providing one third of the Beth’s funding. “But with the stock market crash [of 1929], all bets were off,” said Forgosh. “The hospital was poised to go into receivership. How did the hospital pay its bills? With a series of loans from banks — which suddenly decided to call in their loans.” Prudential Insurance, a long-time corporate presence in Newark, was a strong supporter, with the company’s president declaring the hospital “the greatest accomplishment ever seen by the city of Newark and possibly in the state of New Jersey.”From its earliest years on Lyons Avenue, the hospital also sought aid from the people who had used its services.In a program begun in 1931, parents of babies born at the Beth “were asked to contribute one dollar a year to a babies’ alumni association for research in pediatrics,” said Forgosh. Beth babies would get a notice each year on their birthdays as a reminder that they were born at the Beth. “Every kid who lived in the Weequahic section — with a few excluded — was born at the Beth,” Forgosh said. “When the Beth opened its gift shop or its coffee shop, that was automatically the meeting place. The kids from the Maple Avenue School would have lunch there. Doctors would bring their kids to the reception desk because they all knew the receptionist, Gussie Cohen.” Through the years, the Beth’s accomplishments would be plentiful. The renamed Medical Center performed organ transplants, nuclear medicine, and medical research that led to the discovery of such phenomena as the Rh factor, which could mean life or death to those needing blood transfusions — especially newborns. The Beth had the first hospital-based blood bank in the country, Forgosh noted. But alongside its scientific achievements, the hospital maintained a sense of a social mission spelled out in the original 1901 charter now stored in the JHS archives.“It opened with a creed that said it was nonsectarian, that anybody who needed medical care could come to the Beth. If you read the hospital records early on, if there were 863 patients, 500 of them were given services gratis. It was declared part of the mission of the hospital that no one would be discriminated against based on race, creed, or religion,” she said.That creed would be tested severely for the first time in the early 1960s, with the migration from inner cities to suburbia that sociologists called “white flight.” There was talk of relocating the Beth to the suburbs, Forgosh said; but “under Alan Sagner, then chair of the hospital board, a conscious decision was made to stay in Newark. Hence, a construction program with nine different phases was put into motion, and monies came through gifts and grants to build what has become an urban inner-city hospital today. They truly had to exercise their creed. They had to put their money where their mouths were, and they did.”In 1967 several hundred people injured in the Newark race riots came there for emergency care, she noted.Nearly 30 years later, Beth Israel was sold to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System. “All of the reasons to have a Jewish hospital run by a Jewish board of trustees — with only Jews at the helm — would not survive the health care system that has evolved in this country that requires economies of scale,” said Forgosh. “A hospital cannot function on its own because of its tremendous financial obligations.”When the hospital was sold in 1996, the proceeds were put into the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, which continues to offer grants for healthcare and quality-of-life programs in the Jewish community and beyond. Beyond seeking needed financial contributions from the MetroWest community, Forgosh is asking people born at the Beth to send her their photographs between now and mid-May for inclusion in the exhibit.She is promising a program that will help keep alive more than a century of vital memories. “Even today, in 2005, to say you were born at the Beth means you were part of a vibrant city and a Jewish community. Jews made a place for themselves, they were enormously successful, and they were willing to give back vis a vis establishing this hospital.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.