Jewish Hospital Cincinnati

Nurses’ Home at Jewish Hospital Cincinnati, Ohio. Published by The Cincinnati News Co. Posted on 31 January 1921.

The Jewish hospital in Cincinnati, generally assumed to have been the first in the United States, was established in 1849 or 1850; the Jewish Hospital Association was formally incorporated in 1854. Contemporaneous reports explained that it was created in no small measure to offer Jews with health issues the guarantee that they would neither be harassed by Christian missionaries seeking to convert them—possibly baptizing them while they were unconscious—nor risk being given a Christian burial should they die. Originally not so much a curative institution but primarily a hospice and care home for the elderly and for patients undergoing treatment elsewhere, the hospital was located in private premises on Betts Street. The Nurses’ Home seen here, erected in or soon after 1904 alongside the hospital’s new purpose-built facilities on Burnet Avenue that opened officially on 30 March 1890, was demolished in the 1930 to make way for a larger building. The funds for the original nurses’ home were provided by Joseph Joseph (1847–1904), a German-born Jew who had come to Cincinnati in 1863 and built a commercial empire that included what, under his son David Joseph, became, by the end of the First World War, one of the largest scrap metal enterprises in the United States.