Summary

Creator: Beth Israel Medical Center (New York, N.Y.). Board of Trustees
Title: Records of the Board of Trustees of the Beth Israel Medical Center (New York, N.Y.)
Dates: 1889-2004
Volume: 7 boxes, 58 bound volumes; 17.5 feet (209 inches)

Preface

This is an artificial collection containing the records of the Board of Trustees of the Beth Israel Medical Center. It was created during the processing of a large shipment of material that had previously been in the custody of the Continuum Health Partners legal department and was received by the Aufses Archives in April 2015. For more information on these records’ provenance, please contact the Aufses Archives.

In September 2016, 54 additional bound volumes of minutes, comprising the complete run of minutes for the years 1929-1986, were discovered in an offsite storage account and accessioned by the Aufses Archives as an addition to this collection.

Historical Note

In December 1889, philanthropic members of the Lower East Side Jewish community met to establish the Beth Israel Hospital Association. The purpose of the association was to create a hospital that would serve their growing community while maintaining orthodox dietary and religious laws. Many of these founding Directors were successful garment manufacturers, a common occupation for Eastern European Jewish immigrants at that time, and their first order of business was to raise funds for the new hospital.

The following year, the Hospital was formally chartered by New York State, and over the next two decades the Directors oversaw the growth of Beth Israel from a small outpatient dispensary to a major hospital occupying a state-of-the-art building on Jefferson & Cherry Streets. In 1907 the Board hired Louis J. Frank to serve as Hospital Superintendent; he would serve in this position for the next thirty years, collaborating closely with the Board on renovation and expansion projects. At some point between 1924 and 1927, the Board of Directors was renamed the Board of Trustees.

In 1929, Beth Israel moved to the Dazian Pavilion, a newly constructed 13-story hospital building on Stuyvesant Square, which was then the tallest hospital building in the world. This building remained the center of the Beth Israel campus throughout the 20^th century and was still in use as a hospital building at the time of Beth Israel’s 2013 merger with Mount Sinai.

In the early 1930s Beth Israel affiliated with the Jewish Maternity Hospital, and in 1946, following the gradual absorption of the Maternity Hospital by the obstetrics department of Beth Israel, the two institutions were legally consolidated into a single entity under the Beth Israel Hospital Association name. In 1965, following Beth Israel’s acquisition of the neighboring Manhattan General Hospital, whose facilities became the Morris J. Bernstein Institute for substance abuse treatment, the institution became known as the Beth Israel Medical Center.

In 1997, Beth Israel merged with St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and the Long Island College Hospital to form the Greater Metropolitan Health System, whose name was changed to Continuum Health Partners the following year. In 2013, Continuum Health Partners merged with The Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to form the Mount Sinai Health System.

For additional information about the history of the Beth Israel Medical Center, please contact the Aufses Archives.

Scope and Content

This collection consists primarily of the minutes of the Board of Directors/Trustees of the Beth Israel Hospital and its successor institution the Beth Israel Medical Center. The minutes are complete from 1889 to 2004 with the exception of the years 1892-1896, 1903-1913, and 1925-1926. (The years up to 1989 are in bound volumes; minutes from 1990 on are in folders.) The years 1925-1936 are also covered by an incomplete second set (mostly dated 1928 and 1934-1936) of loose minute pages. Some of these pages include annotations/corrections in what is likely the hand of Hospital Superintendent Louis J. Frank.

The Board initially kept its minutes in Yiddish, but at some point between 1891 and 1897 they switched to English as the language of record. During the preparations for Beth Israel’s 1989 centenary, an English translation of the 1889-1891 Yiddish minute book was created. The translation exists in two versions, a 208-page typescript and a 166-page typescript.

The collection also includes an extensive file of routine Board records for the years 1906-1907, including correspondence, memoranda, and committee reports. (See the Processing Note below for more detail on these items.) These records are organized chronologically by month. There is also a small file of routine Board records from the years 1925-1936.

Finally, the collection contains the 1905-1912 minutes of the Board subcommittee responsible for the administration of the Beth Israel Hospital Training School for Nurses.

Processing Note

As received by the Mount Sinai Archives in 2015, the historical records of the Beth Israel Medical Center were in severe disorder. The present collection was assembled by reuniting Board of Directors/Trustees records that were scattered throughout the disorganized collection.

In particular, the Board material dated 1906-1907 was dispersed in a disorderly manner across numerous containers and existed in (at least) three versions: original typescripts on highly acidic paper; a set of photocopies on high-quality acid-free paper; and a second set of photocopies made from the first.

Judging by the presence of glue marks and damaged paper margins, it appears that the original 1906-1907 records had been collected in a scrapbook that was later disbound. At some point these pages were dispersed among manila folders that were assigned serial numbers but not organized in any way, possibly in an attempt to maintain the literal “original order” of the papers as received. A photocopy matching this arrangement of the documents seems to have been created at this time before becoming dispersed across multiple containers. At some point an incomplete attempt was made (presumably by a later staff member) to organize some of these photocopies in folders labeled with their contents.

During the processing of the Beth Israel records, the processing archivist reunited this scattered material and arranged it in chronological order. Due to the brittle and deteriorating condition of the originals, he chose the high-quality photocopy as the preservation copy to be kept. He compared both sets of photocopies to the originals to ensure that all contents were represented, and made fresh copies on archival paper in cases where the originals or the second set of photocopies contained material missing from the primary set.

Related Collections

The other Beth Israel Medical Center collections that were formed out of the initial April 2015 shipment of records, particularly the Annual Reports and the primary Records collection, include materials that cover the same time span and subject matter as the extant Board of Trustees records. Please contact the Aufses Archives for more information.

The correspondence of Seymour J. Phillips, whose grandfather had been a founder of the Hospital and who served as a Trustee from 1936 until his death in 1987, contains material related to the Board and its activities.

Access Restrictions

As per the standard access policies of the Aufses Archives, materials less than 25 years old may be restricted. Please contact the Archives for additional information.

Container List

Nicholas Webb, June 2016