Markeshia Ricks Photo
The soon-to-open Friendship House.
The calls would come in on Friday, sometimes just two hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath at sundown.
“They need a place to stay they need food, they need this, they need that,” Eli Greer said recently during a tour of a light blue, two-story house on Vernon Street. “They don’t know where they are, or the community.”
The house will soon be that place.
Coming from New York, or even as far away as Massachusetts, the families visit Yale-New Haven Hospital to support the weekend treatment of a family member battling cancer, having a complicated pregnancy, or dealing with a sick child.
If the pressure of all that wasn’t enough stress, observant Jews follow strict dietary laws as well as rules specific to their Sabbath, which lasts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. They don’t drive, work or use any kind of technology, including stoves.
For years, the families had three options: limited access to kosher food at the Suites at Yale; a 1.25-mile trek in an unfamiliar city to an apartment sponsored by the local Jewish community; or camping out in their loved one’s hospital room, trying as best as they could to observe their faith. If they wanted to attend services at the nearest synagogue, they would have to walk at least a mile.
Thanks to the efforts of a group Greer works with — called Friendship House LLC — and a generous donor, now those families will have a fourth, more convenient and comfortable option: staying around the corner from Yale-New Haven at that house on Vernon Street.
“In some cases they’ve been local patients, but in most cases they were patients from out of town who do not have family, do not have support systems, do not have friends who live here,” Greer said. “And they’re coming here and they’re in the middle of either a serious medical crisis or in the middle of a grieving situation and before they even get to the issue of whether or not they need their faith in order, they’re being tested on many levels.”
Greer (pictured) said that given Yale-New Haven’s growing healthcare and research, visiting observant Jews needed a new home-away-from home. A place to stay that would accommodate both their dietary and religious needs, while remaining in close proximity to their loved ones at the hospital.
While the hospital makes many accommodations for all the different people who come there, Greer said it simply wasn’t practical for it to keep the kind of foods on hand that Jews who follow even stricter dietary laws might need. For more than a decade, said members of the local Jewish community tried to find a solution.
But it wasn’t until last year, that a solution started to materialize, Greer said. The answer was the unassuming blue house sitting almost in the shadow of the Smilow Cancer Center, and its soon-to-be neighbor, a new, multimillion dollar Ronald McDonald House. It turned out the blue house was for sale.
Greer said it wasn’t hard to make the decision to buy the house. It takes just a couple of minutes to walk around the block to the hospital now. When the Ronald McDonald House is done, the commute will be cut to as little as 30 seconds because people can walk across that one block campus.
The blue house is a legal two-family. Greer said the initial thought was to do some upgrades to the property to make it hospitable to the Jews who would be staying on the first floor intermittently and rent out the top floor. But as he started to think through this soon-to-be “bikur cholim” house (for the Hebrew phrase for visiting the sick), and its proximity to the medical campus and the Ronald McDonald House, they came to the conclusion that the location had more potential.
So he and fellow organizers reached out to someone who could help them achieve that greater potential. That person was David Lichtenstein, a New York-based real estate mogul and philanthropist with a heart for providing such places of refuge. He has funded six similar properties near other big hospitals like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital. Lichtenstein wasn’t interested in a house with a rental unit. He agreed to underwrite the cost of a full renovation of the house so that it could be used strictly for families visiting sick patients at the nearby hospital. Greer said the New Haven folks agreed, and the New Haven Friendship House was born. The group paid $128,000 to buy the house and now plans $175,000 in renovations, he said.
Greer said short-term renovations have been made on the downstairs space. He said he expects the house will be able to accommodate guests, who stay for free, starting in mid-February. Inside the house, the downstairs includes three rooms, two of which could be used for sleeping spaces and another area Greer said would make a good common area. A kitchen to hold all the kosher food, but no stove, is also taking shape. There is a newly renovated bathroom. The heat and electricity are in working order, and the floors will soon be redone. Bigger plans to transform the space will probably pick up steam in the spring.
“Nothing over the top for now,” he said. “But it will hold.”