Beth Israel Medical Center records

Identity elements

Reference code

US AA088.S003.SS001

Name and location of repository

Level of description

Subseries

Title

Beth Israel Medical Center records

Date(s)

  • 1890-2013 (Creation)

Extent

8 boxes (62 inches)

Name of creator

Administrative history

The Beth Israel Hospital was founded in New York City in 1889. Initially established to serve the Lower East Side's growing population of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the Hospital grew into a major charitable hospital serving patients of all backgrounds. In the 1890s it was based out of existing structures on the Lower East Side, but in 1902 the Hospital moved to a purpose-built hospital building on Jefferson and Cherry Streets, and in 1929 it relocated to its present location on East 17th Street. In the ensuing years the Hospital affiliated with numerous other medical institutions and expanded its 17th Street campus through the construction of new buildings and the purchase of adjacent structures, including the neighboring Manhattan General Hospital. In 1965 the institution was renamed the Beth Israel Medical Center to reflect this growth. In 1997, Beth Israel joined several other New York City hospitals in the establishment of Continuum Health Partners, a multi-hospital system. Following the merger of Continuum Health Partners and The Mount Sinai Medical Center in 2013, Beth Israel became a part of the newly established Mount Sinai Health System. It was renamed Mount Sinai Beth Israel the following year.

Content and structure elements

Scope and content

System of arrangement

Note that this alphabetical listing of folder titles is not arranged strictly by box/folder number. The contents of later accretions were added to this listing where they would naturally fall alphabetically, but they are stored separately starting in Box 6.

Conditions of access and use elements

Conditions governing access

These records may be closed for a minimum of 25 years from creation, depending on their content. Please contact the Archives (MSArchives@mssm.edu) for additional information.

Physical access

Technical access

Conditions governing reproduction

Languages of the material

  • English
  • Yiddish

Scripts of the material

    Language and script notes

    Materials primarily in English; some early items in Yiddish

    Finding aids

    Acquisition and appraisal elements

    Custodial history

    This is an artificial collection. It consists of Beth Israel Medical Center records which arrived as part of the April 2015 Continuum Health Partners shipment (see provenance note below) that did not fit into any clearly defined records series such as minutes or annual reports. It also includes subsequent accretions, including approximately 17 inches of material that had been in the possession of the Continuum Health Partners Development Department and were accessioned in 2018. In April 2015, the Mount Sinai Archives received a large shipment of records related to the history of Continuum Health Partners, which merged with Mount Sinai in 2013 to form the Mount Sinai Health System. The majority of this material consisted of records and photographs documenting the history of the Beth Israel Medical Center between its founding in 1889 and the early 1990s.

    Before being shipped to the Archives these records had been in the storeroom of the Continuum Health Partners legal department. Their full provenance and custodial history is unclear. For a portion of their history they were in the custody of the Beth Israel Archives, which was established in the mid-1980s during the preparations for Beth Israel's 1989 centennial and had closed by the late 1990s. Evidence in the collection shows that several professional archivists were hired as consultants in the years prior to the centennial and that Debra Tadevich served for a time as a full-time professional archivist. The precise date on which the Beth Israel Archives ceased operation is not certain. (See the separate bibliography of sources related to the Beth Israel Archives for further discussion of this timeline.)

    The records as received by Mount Sinai appeared to have been partially processed at various points in their history. A handful of items had received conservation treatment, typically in the form of Mylar sleeves. Preservation photocopies had been made of some fragile materials. Some series, such as the minutes of the Medical Board, had been housed in acid-free folders, but many others were loose and disorderly. Many boxes also displayed unusual storage choices, such as the horizontal storage of folders within oversized boxes.

    Reconstructing the arrangement and description practices of the Beth Israel Archives is difficult. The materials received showed evidence of at least two distinct box numbering schemes in use at different stages in the collection's custodial history. Many boxes had typewritten labels containing an alphanumeric code of the form "AR 360 Esh1 Box 1200." This seems to have been a shelf numbering system in use at the Beth Israel library. Additionally, a few boxes also had handwritten labels containing more typical serial numbering of the form "Box 1," "Box 2," etc. Some boxes did not have either label. Still other boxes contained disorderly Pendaflex folders which appeared to have come from office drawers.

    Further complicating the understanding of these records, it is known that the records now housed at Mount Sinai are only a subset of the former holdings of the Beth Israel Archives. At some point in the mid-2000s, following the closure of the Archives, a collection of material was sent out for scanning by a service bureau. During scanning, the material was organized arbitrarily by shipping box, rather than any sort of provenance or subject order. The scans include office ephemera such as accession and reference forms, Society of American Archivists manuals, and miscellaneous medical texts, suggesting that the contents of the defunct Archives office were boxed up and shipped out for scanning under the direction of a non-archivist without consideration of their contents or arrangement. Deborah Falik, who arrived at Beth Israel after the scans were created and was librarian there at the time of the merger, provided the Mount Sinai Archives with copies of the scans and with her own descriptive inventory of their contents.

    The material now physically held by the Mount Sinai Archives includes some but not all of the material that was scanned, which means that some material in paper Beth Israel collections also exists in scanned format. Since the scans are of low quality, and the scanned material is arranged arbitrarily (often with multiple physical documents combined in a single PDF file), no systematic attempt was made to cross-reference scans with their physical originals, but in cases where a scanned item has been identified that adds additional content to a series whose paper version is incomplete on paper (for example, filling in a missing year), a note of this has been made in the box/folder list of the relevant collection.

    Users of Beth Israel collections should also be aware of the fact that some Beth Israel Archives material now exists only in scanned format. This scanned material has not been arranged or described beyond the inventory created by Deborah Falik, which corresponds to the arbitrary arrangement of the files when they were sent out for scanning, but this inventory can be used as a tool to locate additional scanned items that may be of relevance.

    The present collection of Beth Israel records also includes a small amount of material related to Beth Israel's Chemistry Lab (Folders 2-7 through 2-11) which did not arrive as part of the April 2015 shipment. These items were found in the Mount Sinai Clinical Chemistry Laboratory during an office renovation in 2015 and transferred to the Archives. They appear to have belonged to a doctor or chemist who had appointments at both Mount Sinai and Beth Israel and kept the items in his possession. In addition, it includes approximately 7" of miscellaneous material that was found among a subsequent shipment of material from offsite storage in September 2016. Boxes 6 and 7 contain material originating with the Development Department of Continuum Health Partners, which was retrieved from offsite storage in 2018-19.

    Immediate source of acquisition

    Appraisal, destruction and scheduling information

    Accruals

    Related materials elements

    Existence and location of originals

    Existence and location of copies

    Related archival materials

    National Library of Medicine, Lawrence Kolb papers: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-2934112R-root

    Notes element

    Specialized notes

    Alternative identifier(s)

    Legacy ID from CMS

    AA.001273

    OCLC Number

    1111633080

    Description control element

    Rules or conventions

    Sources used

    Archivist's note

    In April 2015, the Mount Sinai Archives received a large shipment of records related to the history of Continuum Health Partners, which merged with Mount Sinai in 2013 to form the Mount Sinai Health System. The majority of this material consisted of records and photographs documenting the history of the Beth Israel Medical Center between its founding in 1889 and the early 1990s.

    Before being shipped to the Archives these records had been in the storeroom of the Continuum Health Partners legal department. Their full provenance and custodial history is unclear. For a portion of their history they were in the custody of the Beth Israel Archives, which was established in the mid-1980s during the preparations for Beth Israel's 1989 centennial and had closed by the late 1990s. Evidence in the collection shows that several professional archivists were hired as consultants in the years prior to the centennial and that Debra Tadevich served for a time as a full-time professional archivist. The precise date on which the Beth Israel Archives ceased operation is not certain. (See the separate bibliography of sources related to the Beth Israel Archives for further discussion of this timeline.)

    The records as received by Mount Sinai appeared to have been partially processed at various points in their history. A handful of items had received conservation treatment, typically in the form of Mylar sleeves. Preservation photocopies had been made of some fragile materials. Some series, such as the minutes of the Medical Board, had been housed in acid-free folders, but many others were loose and disorderly. Many boxes also displayed unusual storage choices, such as the horizontal storage of folders within oversized boxes.

    Reconstructing the arrangement and description practices of the Beth Israel Archives is difficult. The materials received showed evidence of at least two distinct box numbering schemes in use at different stages in the collection's custodial history. Many boxes had typewritten labels containing an alphanumeric code of the form "AR 360 Esh1 Box 1200." This seems to have been a shelf numbering system in use at the Beth Israel library. Additionally, a few boxes also had handwritten labels containing more typical serial numbering of the form "Box 1," "Box 2," etc. Some boxes did not have either label. Still other boxes contained disorderly Pendaflex folders which appeared to have come from office drawers.

    Further complicating the understanding of these records, it is known that the records now housed at Mount Sinai are only a subset of the former holdings of the Beth Israel Archives. At some point in the mid-2000s, following the closure of the Archives, a collection of material was sent out for scanning by a service bureau. During scanning, the material was organized arbitrarily by shipping box, rather than any sort of provenance or subject order. The scans include office ephemera such as accession and reference forms, Society of American Archivists manuals, and miscellaneous medical texts, suggesting that the contents of the defunct Archives office were boxed up and shipped out for scanning under the direction of a non-archivist without consideration of their contents or arrangement. Deborah Falik, who arrived at Beth Israel after the scans were created and was librarian there at the time of the merger, provided the Mount Sinai Archives with copies of the scans and with her own descriptive inventory of their contents.

    The material now physically held by the Mount Sinai Archives includes some but not all of the material that was scanned, which means that some material in paper Beth Israel collections also exists in scanned format. Since the scans are of low quality, and the scanned material is arranged arbitrarily (often with multiple physical documents combined in a single PDF file), no systematic attempt was made to cross-reference scans with their physical originals, but in cases where a scanned item has been identified that adds additional content to a series whose paper version is incomplete on paper (for example, filling in a missing year), a note of this has been made in the box/folder list of the relevant collection.

    Users of Beth Israel collections should also be aware of the fact that some Beth Israel Archives material now exists only in scanned format. This scanned material has not been arranged or described beyond the inventory created by Deborah Falik, which corresponds to the arbitrary arrangement of the files when they were sent out for scanning, but this inventory can be used as a tool to locate additional scanned items that may be of relevance.

    The present collection of Beth Israel records also includes a small amount of material related to Beth Israel's Chemistry Lab (Folders 2-7 through 2-11) which did not arrive as part of the April 2015 shipment. These items were found in the Mount Sinai Clinical Chemistry Laboratory during an office renovation in 2015 and transferred to the Archives. They appear to have belonged to a doctor or chemist who had appointments at both Mount Sinai and Beth Israel and kept the items in his possession. In addition, it includes approximately 7" of miscellaneous material that was found among a subsequent shipment of material from offsite storage in September 2016. Boxes 6 and 7 contain material originating with the Development Department of Continuum Health Partners, which was retrieved from offsite storage in 2018-19. The April 2015 shipment of records from Continuum Health Partners arrived in an extremely disorderly condition. During the processing of this material, identifiable records series were separated out into separate collections (see related collections note below.) This often required reassembling series which had become dispersed across multiple containers. All other paper records from the April 2015 shipment have been arranged together in this general Records collection.

    Photographic prints and negatives have been organized into three series (Buildings, Events and Subjects) and stored in a filing cabinet in the Mount Sinai Archives office. Images of individuals have been placed into the main Archives' Bio photograph files. Photographic slides have been processed and interfiled with the prints and negatives. AV material, including films and reel-to-reel recordings, has been cataloged as part of the main Aufses Archives audiovisual and sound recordings collections.

    Access points

    Subject access points

    Place access points

    Name access points

    Genre access points

    Accession area