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History of JMHRC

The history of Jewish Memorial Hospital began in the early part of the 20th century, when Boston’s famed Beth Israel Hospital opened as a forty-five bed medical facility in Roxbury in 1916 to cater to the community’s growing Jewish immigrant population.

In the 1920s, Beth Israel moved its medical facility to Brookline and sold the Roxbury building to the Roxbury Ladies Bikkur Cholim Society, an organization of Jewish women devoted to communal health care. That facility eventually became the Jewish Memorial Hospital.

Now approaching the 75th anniversary of its founding, the Jewish Memorial Hospital played a pivotal role in the care of Roxbury´s Jewish population. Even after Roxbury’s Jewish population began moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish Memorial Hospital continued its sense of community commitment to Roxbury’s newer residents. Through the efforts of Kivie Kaplan, a president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, among others, support for Jewish Memorial Hospital remained a priority of Boston’s Jewish community.

"Jewish Memorial Hospital and Rehabilitation Center is a prime example of a community serving its people," commented Rabbi Alvin Lieberman, the hospital’s chaplain. "In the broadest sense," continued Rabbi Lieberman, "Jewish Memorial Hospital has served all people, and it made no difference that Jews were replaced by other ethnic and racial groups." Joan Krizack, archival consultant to the Society, who is archivist and head of special collections at Northeastern University, will oversee the archival processing. Krizack is the editor of the highly acclaimed Documentation Planning for the U.S. Health Care System (1994).