Even as it plans celebrations for its centennial, the Daughters of Israel nursing facility in West Orange is working to make sure it thrives in the future.
The facility has embarked on a two-year, $12 million construction project designed to improve decor, expand wheelchair accessibility, and enhance amenities. The effort will upgrade living conditions in one of its two wings, affecting 110 of its 298 residents whose rooms were not touched in a prior renovation.
“Because we have fulfilled our mission for a century, we hope to continue that mission by providing optimum care and optimum quality of life for our residents,” said Sharon Glaser, director of marketing and public relations at the home.
Daughters will kick off its centennial celebration with a May 22 golf tournament at Canoe Brook Country Club in Short Hills that will function as a fund-raiser for the home’s capital construction campaign.
Between then and June of 2007, it will be party time for the residents, their families, and supporters of the facility, with a luncheon, a carnival, a birthday celebration, and a dinner-dance among the events on its social calendar.
From Dec. 1, 2006, to Jan. 22, 2007, the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest will mark the centennial with an exhibit of vintage photographs and documents detailing the home’s humble beginnings in Newark and its evolution into a prominent geriatric institution.
The exhibit will be on display at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany before relocating to Daughters.
For years, Linda Forgosh, JHS curator and outreach director, has been compiling records and studying minutes of the home’s business meetings. Her research will provide a backdrop for the exhibit, which will cover the history of the institution from the time its founders first met two years before it opened its doors on Dec. 25, 1906.
“The story of Daughters is more than one of institutionalized healthcare. It is about this community seeing a need and stepping in to fill the void,” said Forgosh. “It was the brainchild of the women of Newark’s Jewish community.”
Back in 1904, a group of 18 women gathered at Blume Hollander’s house on Hunterdon Street in Newark for their first brainstorming session, looking for a way to care for their aging parents and other elderly community members.
They made blintzes to sell, solicited free food from local merchants, sold raffle tickets, and organized card games and lunches to raise the funds they needed to purchase a former eye and ear infirmary on Sterling Street in Newark.
“Women tend to be caretakers in general. For the most part, they weren’t in the workforce, so those subjects of caretaking — children or elderly parents — naturally fell into the women’s purview,” said Forgosh. “They became extremely creative in figuring out how to create the nursing home and how to support it,” said the historian.
Two years later, the institution opened as a “custodial residence” called “Israel’s Daughters Home for the Aged.”
It was “in an era long before there were medically staffed nursing homes,” said Forgosh. “Remember, it was a time with no federal aid and no state aid, just community support through individuals who dug into their pockets to finance this effort.”
The name was changed in February 1908 to the Daughters of Israel Home for the Aged.
Sometimes its fund-raising worked in mysterious ways, Forgosh recalled, citing one example that dated back to the prohibition era of the 1920s. One Newark bootlegger’s daughter married another’s son at a Newark catering hall called Schary’s Manor.
It was owned by the parents of Dore Schary, the Newark-born screenwriter and movie executive who became chief of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.
“Dore Schary wrote in his memoirs that the drunken wedding party got out of hand,” said Forgosh. People started fighting, and there was a fear that some of the gangsters would pull out guns.
“So Mrs. Schary, Dore’s mother, decided it was time to wheel out a lot of lox and eggs and coffee just to calm the crowd down,” said Forgosh. “But after it was over, the bride’s and groom’s parents were slightly abashed at what had gone on. Somebody made the suggestion that to compensate for this affair, a generous donation should be made to Daughters of Israel, which was always looking for donations.
“So the father of the bride offered five Gs, and the father of the groom offered five Gs, and Daughters was the recipient of $10,000,” she said.
By 1928, Daughters’ population had grown beyond its original 18 residents, and the home purchased the building on High Street that had housed the second of Newark Beth Israel Hospital’s three incarnations. The hospital had already moved to its current location on Lyons Avenue.
On High Street, the home struggled to survive during the turbulent years of the Depression. It again faced fiscal challenges after World War II, when the financial needs of a newly independent Israel made competing demands for funds from Newark’s Jewish community.
In 1951, the home affiliated with the Jewish Community Council of Essex County, a forerunner of today’s United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.
Two years later, Daughters officially became a nursing home after applying and receiving certification from the state of New Jersey.
Beginning in 1955, key supporters raised nearly $2 million to purchase and build on its current West Orange campus.
“They just ran out of room in Newark,” Forgosh said. “The High Street building was built as a hospital, and it didn’t have all those areas of wide space that might have been needed by 185 residents of a nursing home.
When Daughters residents moved from their Newark home to their new facility on Pleasant Valley Way in West
Orange in March of 1962, they were transported by a caravan of cars and ambulances, escorted by police from the inner city to suburbia.
By 1969, the home felt a need to expand, and Nathan Plafsky of Millburn stepped in to raise the necessary funds. He went on to serve as president of Daughters from 1969 to 1972, and in 1999, in tribute to a generous gift from him, the facility was renamed the Daughters of Israel Plafsky Family Campus.
Daughters has continued to thrive, occasionally buffeted by rising costs and changes — like those created by Medicare — in the way the local and federal governments provide financing for nursing care. Now a partner agency of UJC MetroWest, the home has become a state-of-the-art facility, with extensive rehabilitation facilities, subacute care, a unit for individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia, and a resource center for caregivers, as well as Jewish cultural programs, a synagogue, and a full-time rabbi.
“It is a testament to the strength of the institution that it has lasted 100 years, and hopefully it will last another 100,” said Jerry Baranoff, a Cranford resident who served as president from 2002 to 2005.
“I look forward to the future,” he said even as he noted that Daughters faces “a challenging future. Government reimbursement seems to be moving away from the nursing home environment and is encouraging people to either age in place or go to these burgeoning assisted-living communities, and it has affected a lot of nursing homes.”
“The purpose was to create an institution with a long life attached to it,” Forgosh said. “It has taken an amazing collective effort to have done this. It has been a going concern for 100 years.”
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