Ten to 15 times a week on average, a shooting victim arrives at Mount Sinai Hospital on Chicago’s West Side.
The hospital’s emergency room doctors, nurses and technicians are good at their work, “as you’d expect,” Sinai Health System CEO Karen Teitelbaum tells us matter-of-factly. Sinai treats more than 500 gunshot patients a year and saves nearly all of them. A benchmark mortality rate nationally for such traumatic injuries is 8.5%. “Ours is 1.8%,” Teitelbaum says. “I think that speaks to the skill we have.”
The unanswerable question is: What would the state of care in Lawndale be like if Mount Sinai didn’t exist? The fascinating corollary question, steeped in Chicago history: How is it that Mount Sinai, a hospital with Jewish roots, opened at 15th and California in 1919 — and then stayed and grew, instead of moving when the neighborhood’s Jews left for the North Side and the suburbs?
With the hospital celebrating its 100th anniversary, Teitelbaum is proud of the answer: Sinai didn’t abandon the West Side because its mission from the beginning was to “serve a vulnerable community.” For a long time, that meant caring for Eastern European Jews. Then it meant serving African Americans. Now the hospital also has a growing number of Hispanic patients.
Teitelbaum says only about 5% to 8% of patients are covered by commercial insurance. The rest use Medicare or Medicaid, or are uninsured.
Previous century, similar story: Back in the early 1920s, more than 82% of Mount Sinai’s work was provided partially or entirely free, with the unpaid costs covered by contributions. Philanthropy came mainly from Chicago’s Jewish community: On May 6, 1923, several thousand Chicago Jews attended an event at the Auditorium Theater to kick off a $2.5 million fundraising drive to benefit Mount Sinai, Michael Reese Hospital and other charities. Henry Horner, later to become Illinois’ first Jewish governor, spoke. One backer was Sears, Roebuck & Co. chief Julius Rosenwald. “Generous support of this laudable effort by the entire Jewish community is a matter of public service and duty,” Rosenwald said.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Chicago’s early Jewish community came mostly from Germany to the South Side. They founded Michael Reese Hospital. The second wave of Jewish immigrants came to the West Side from Eastern Europe: They were poorer, spoke Yiddish and practiced Orthodox rather than Reform Judaism.
What united the Jewish community was the need for medical care. Anti-Semitism was commonplace. Other hospitals wouldn’t teach Jewish doctors. West Side Jews needed a hospital, but when Michael Reese expanded there, it assigned German-speaking doctors and declined to set up a kosher kitchen. That’s what spurred the creation of Mount Sinai.
Fast-forward to the post-World War II era when West Side Jews began to leave, to be replaced by the black community. The pressure grew on Mount Sinai to follow its patients to Rogers Park or the North Shore. Sinai refused. “We have a responsibility to continue to serve the 150,000 residents of the Lawndale community,” the hospital said in 1974.
Mount Sinai Hospital’s decision not to abandon its post represents one of the great unsung moments in Chicago philanthropy history.
Today Sinai boasts of being the largest private safety-net health system in Chicago. It still relies to an extent on philanthropy. “Financially, there are easier ways to make a living,” Teitelbaum says.
Congratulations on getting to 100, Mount Sinai. We know it wasn’t easy.
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