Were you born at “the Beth?” Generations are proud to have entered the world at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, a 673-bed teaching hospital that offers comprehensive healthcare to its communities and is a major referral and treatment center for patients throughout the northern New Jersey metropolitan area.
The lively history of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, an affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, is typical of the histories of the voluntary nonprofit Jewish hospitals in the United States from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.
The Need for Healthcare
At the turn of the 20th century, Newark, N.J. was a city filled with tanneries, breweries, varnish factories, fine silver manufacturers, and inventors who hoped to emulate its most famous resident—Thomas Edison.
City officials struggled to overcome the myriad industrial accidents, sanitation problems, and epidemics of diphtheria, typhus, and smallpox that had made Newark the nation’s unhealthiest city.
With population exceeding 100,000 in the 1890 census, Newark would endure one of the first outbreaks of polio in 1916. Because of its proximity to Fort Dix, the city was an epicenter of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
On Oct. 22, 1900, Newark residents first learned of the possibility of a Jewish hospital when newsboys held up copies of the Newark Evening News and shouted, “There’s Trouble in the Beth Israel Hospital Association!” When the men of the association voted to open a storefront dispensary, the women broke away, renaming themselves the Daughters of Israel and purchasing a crumbling mansion that opened as a 28-bed hospital on Aug. 31, 1902. For six years, the dispensary and hospital operated separate facilities. They merged their services in 1908, when a 110-bed, four-story facility opened on the site of the old mansion.
Expression of Assimilation
“They come to the United States, eager to breathe the air of freedom, anxious to repay the country for this blessing that she offers,” said Reform Rabbi Solomon Foster at the dedication ceremony Jan. 30, 1908. For the Eastern European Jews who passed through Ellis Island from 1880 to 1920, the founding of a Jewish hospital became their expression of becoming Americans.
In Newark, more than 87 Jewish societies, workmen’s lodges, and synagogues provided funds for the hospital. The 1908 opening was celebrated with a massive parade through the immigrant neighborhood, where tenements were festooned with American flag bunting.
The Beth practiced a nonsectarian policy in hospital admissions, the extension of hospital privileges to doctors, and the hiring of hospital staff. “While this hospital will be mainly supported by Jews, it will open its doors just as wide as they can swing to receive all who may desire to enter, and his religious sentiments shall be carefully safeguarded,” the policy stated. Kosher meals were available upon request, and Christmas decorations were displayed to cheer patients.
Images of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center over the course of the hospital’s 105-year history.
Community-based Care
In 1924, a new, modern image of the hospital appeared on billboards and newspapers: Miss Beth, who launched a campaign for a new hospital with the question: “Is your heart with the hospital?”
The third hospital—a 350-bed yellow-brick tower with a Spanish tile roof—rose nearly 200 feet from its foundation like a sentinel beckoning its community. The new hospital opened in 1928, relocated from the city center to the southern tip of the city north of Lake Weequahic.