While researching his award-winning book Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” historian Alan M. Kraut became intrigued by the response of religious communities to disease. “I started asking, why did all these private Catholic hospitals spring up?” Kraut concluded it was an effort by the church to provide parishioners with access to priests, sacraments, and dietary needs. “At the time,” he said, “there were many evangelical death-bed conversions occurring. The church built these hospitals to protect its institution — and the Jewish faith followed suit.”

He pursued this subject in a new book, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (Rutgers University Press, 2007), which he coauthored with Deborah A. Kraut, his wife. The Krauts tell the story of Beth Israel hospital in Newark, New Jersey. “Most hospital histories are what I call stories of great docs,” said Alan Kraut. “They chronicle histories of bald white guys opening up operating rooms and give blow-by-blow accounts of the installation of the first X-ray machine. Dull, dull, dull.”

Alan and Deborah Kraut set out to tell a different type of history. “What we discovered was that everyone who worked at the Beth, who built it, felt that it was their gift to the community,” said Alan. “In the mid-1800s, many Jews were poor immigrants. They did not want to be a burden on the community. The Jewish hospitals were built to take care of them — and also to take care of people of other faiths who had little money.”

The Beth opened its doors in 1902 and eventually became Newark’s preeminent hospital. “The hospital survived many challenges: the Great Depression, urban riots, and urban flight. It thrived due to its flexibility and commitment to the community,” Alan Kraut said. “This was a hospital

where little kids crossed the lobby as a shortcut on their way home from school, where its nurses and doctors lived two blocks away. It was never a cold medical institution: It was a powerful intersection between hospital, community, people, and medicine.”

The Krauts scoured newspaper archives and hospital records and collected oral histories to piece together the story. “We made a great team,” said Alan, “we’re still married. Deborah, who has a medical background, proved an apt partner. She was able to shed light on the inner workings of a hospital in a way I never could.” Deborah Kraut appreciated the partnership, too. “We provided different perspectives,” she said. “Alan obviously is the historian, but I had a nuts-and-bolts understanding of the hospital departments and the terminology.”

In 1996, after struggling against pressures of managed care and government regulation, the Beth was sold to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System — under these conditions: the hospital would keep its name and the Star of David would remain visible on the building.

“As a historian, you are often inspired by current events to look to the past, to learn how previous generations answered the same questions we are grappling with now,” said the CAS professor. “This is the ideal moment for us to enter a national debate over health care. Now that we are in the midst of a great wave of immigration, one of the big issues is that many newcomers are uninsured and have no access to medical care, just as many native-born Americans lack health insurance,” he said. “I hope it makes a difference that once upon a time there was a wonderful hospital with great medicine that came out of the community. I’d like for us to draw some wisdom from the past.”

— Anne Bentzel