There are not many old Jewish institutions that I could say I remember personally. But there is one that I recall with dread. At the age of three I had my tonsils out. I hated it. But I hated even more the London Jewish Hospital.
By all accounts, it was not a very good hospital. Also, by those same accounts, it was a lifeline to Jews in London’s East End who queued to be admitted. As a university lecture next month will show, to them it was the “haimishe” place to go if you had cancer or if you had a broken finger.
It was where the nurses spoke Yiddish; where staff helped elderly women to light candles at their bedside (just imagine the fire risks); and where there was always a rabbi on duty, who made sure the food was kosher and who held services in one of the wards three times a day, blew the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur. He also was there to put his arms around relatives of dying patients.
It was the nurses I remember — a tough bunch who bore similarities to prison wardens. They banned visitors for child patients like me. When I cried out for my beloved aunt Sylvia ,who had told me how nice it was going to be, I seem to recall being ordered to keep quiet as a thermometer was unceremoniously shoved up my rear end.
I cried so much that they sent me home and I had to come back again for the operation itself, where I was held down by a couple of nurses while what I thought was a face flannel smothered me. Anaesthetics were already pretty advanced, but this hospital was still using chloroform.
They also had what was called “sun ray treatment”. Children were stripped to the waist and given goggles to wear while hot electric beams were played on their (mine included) little bodies. My mother, bless her, thought I needed to improve my physique. No one seemed to know much about the effects of radioactivity.
“No,” Howard Rein would tell me many years later, “medical science was not very advanced there.” Mr Rein wrote about the LJH for the PhD that was awarded as he lay on his death bed at the age of 74, two years ago. A lecture in his name will be delivered on November 20 at Southampton University, where he researched his work.
The LJH was the brainwave of a Whitechapel barber, Isidor Berliner, who spent every waking moment when he was not cutting hair walking the streets of the East End with a collecting tin, begging for pennies to help him realise his dream of that haimishe hospital.
Not everyone approved. The “Cousinhood” — the name given to the Anglo-Jewish network led by the first Lord Rothschild — opposed the project vociferously from the time collections began in 1902. They thought it separated the Jews from their neighbours. Seventeen years later, a second
Lord Rothschild had come on the scene. He was not just a supporter of the project, but its president and hosted a banquet at the Savoy to raise funds with the support of the then editor of the JC, Leopold Greenberg.
The Jewish aristocrats could not understand the needs of their much poorer co-religionists. They also had no idea about what religious Jews regarded as the problem with other places, including the nearby London Hospital (now the Royal London). This had nothing to do with medical treatment, which was among the best in Britain, but the work of missionaries, who plagued the uneducated and unworldly Jews with stories of the joys of life if they converted to Christianity. There was even a Jewish Missionary Hospital not far away.
But LJH did not last long. It closed after 29 years with the coming of the NHS. It is now the site of a private hospital.
To many of the patients, fear of missionaries was enough reason for a real Jewish hospital — even if it was relatively backward medically. “They weren’t very good,” Mr Rein told me. “They had a good psychiatry department, but the doctors were not the most brilliant. There was no prestige in working at the Jewish Hospital.” But for the people who went there free, it really was a lifeline. With a little bit of love thrown in.
