The Jewish Hospital of Philadelphia

By the middle of the eighteen hundreds, Philadelphia's Jewish population had grown sharply as Jewish families fled persecution in Germany. In eighteen sixty-four, the community organized the Jewish Hospital, the first hospital in Pennsylvania funded and established by Jewish people. It was open to patients of all backgrounds, but it was built to provide something other institutions could not: kosher food, and the observance of Jewish religious practices.

It operated under that name for nearly ninety years before being renamed Albert Einstein Medical Center in nineteen fifty-two. What began as a community's answer to exclusion became one of the region's major health institutions.