The Park Ridge Center recently received a planning grant from the Michael Reese Charitable Trust to create a program on Judaism and Healthcare Ethics. During the year-long planning phase, the Center will convene an advisory group of Jewish scholars, rabbis, community representatives, and healthcare practitioners. The committee, chaired by Rabbi Peter Knobel of Beth Emet The Free Synagogue in Evanston, IL, will guide this important development phase.

Judaism, with its richly developed history of moral reflection, has much to offer the discussions brought by changes in medicine that raise fundamental questions about human personhood, privacy, discrimination, and justice; reproduction and world population; aging; xenotransplantation; dying and death; and biotechnology. Sporadically, a specifically Jewish concern has been voiced, for example, around BRCA 1 [breast cancer] testing. What Judaism has to say about specific, already identifiable ethical problems has received little public visibility. Yet, Judaism's ethos and commitment to justice is an available but relatively untapped resource for identifying ethical issues in healthcare and for working toward their resolution. Judaic law, wisdom literature, and other written and oral sources can offer abundant guidance about general and specific questions both to Jews and non-Jews.

The project is timely for another reason. Jewish community hospitals were once common in cities with a substantial Jewish population. These hospitals, originally a necessity because of discrimination at other hospitals, practiced Judaism's ethical, social, and spiritual values in a relatively homogenous environment. As ethical and spiritual problems arose, the medical staff, the community's religious and lay leaders, and others could discuss them in a setting born of a common commitment, history, and ethos (if not agreement about specifics). Today, rapid shifts in the organization of medicine have disrupted traditional sources of connectedness for considered and ongoing discussion of ethical issues from a Jewish perspective.

The program will provide opportunities for such discussion through seminars, conferences, and publications. Its long range goal is to establish a resource center where questions and concerns on the relationship of Judaism and health care can receive full attention.