Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America

Epilogue

224 Epilogue
Acentury after the birth of Beth Israel Hospital, Newark is once again a city of economic opportunity and a city of immigrants. While the tanneries and breweries are gone, banks, insurance companies, and small businesses flourish. Newcomers from Africa, China, Mexico, and El Salvador have replaced the Italians, Irish, Germans, and Eastern European Jews. African Americans whose parents or grandparents migrated to Newark from the South for jobs and to escape Jim Crow are now among Newark’s older families. Walking the streets and neighborhoods, one can still pass reminders of an earlier Newark. Old synagogue buildings such as the Anshe Russia Synagogue, Jewish cemeteries, and names on museums, concert halls, and buildings remind visitors that Jewish immigrants once came to Newark and flourished. The Star of David at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center is displayed at the front entrance of the hospital; the 1928 Spanish-style building at the top of the hill above Lake Weequahic is still faintly visible to those speeding by in cars and trains, a presence in the South Ward skyline and in the hearts of many Newarkers who were born there or who owe their lives to its medical staff. Across the country there are similar Jewish hospital buildings, their bricks darkened with age. Of the thirty-six accredited Jewish hospitals identified by the Beth’s Dr. Max Danzis in his 1940 Medical Leaves article, almost all are still components of the U.S. health-care system. As the historian Rosemary Stevens observed, “Voluntary hospitals have been successful organizations in the past hundred years because of their chameleon-like adjustments to changing conditions.”1 Some hospitals have evolved into powerful medical centers that bear names reflecting their Jewish ancestry, such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. Some are members of university medical systems, such as the Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital, a part of the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System; and the Miriam Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, a component of Tufts-Brown Lifespan. Some Jewish hospitals merged with other urban hospitals, as Jewish and Barnes Hospitals merged in St. Louis and then expanded into the BJC Health Care system, and Jewish Hospital in Louisville, which became the network called the Jewish Hospital Healthcare Service. Ecumenical mergers of voluntary hospitals founded under different religious auspices have become leading medical centers, such as the Beth Israel–Deaconess Hospital in Boston. The Mount Sinai New York Unity Health System in New York City is both an ecumenical merger and an amalgamation with a university medical system. Other hospitals, like the Milwaukee and Detroit Sinai Hospitals, and the Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, have been incorporated into health-care systems while retaining their individual names. (See Appendix, Table 2.) Many of these contemporary incarnations of Jewish hospitals celebrate not only their religious heritage but also their medical heritage as voluntary hospitals. If the independent voluntary charitable hospitals have finally melted in the crucible of U.S. health care, their histories are reminders of a rich heritage . And they lasted far longer than was expected. Experts in health care were forecasting the voluntary hospital’s demise even before World War II; while such predictions were premature, they were often grounded in sound analyses of the institutions’ strengths and vulnerabilities. Complex Arrays of Strengths and Weaknesses Perhaps no American understood voluntary hospitals in the twentieth century better than Dr. S. S. Goldwater. A physician of German Jewish background and an eminent hospital administrator, Goldwater for nearly thirty years served as superintendent and director of New York’s premier voluntary hospital, Mount Sinai (1903–1929). As commissioner of hospitals of Greater New York from 1930 to 1939, he witnessed the impact of the Depression on voluntary and public hospitals. From 1940 until his death in 1942, Goldwater was the president of the Associated Hospital Service, the New York Blue Cross Plan, just as prepayment insurance plans took hold in the United States. Through all the decades, he continued to serve on the editorial board of Modern Hospital, coauthoring articles on the hospitals of the Epilogue 225 month and offering commentaries on the state of hospitals. On the eve of World War II, in January 1940, he traveled to Chicago, the city he considered “the center of organized medical care for the entire country,” to address a meeting of the Chicago Hospital Council...