In December 1991, six representatives of the state Department of Public Health arrived in the Sherwin Manor Nursing Center on the North Side of Chicago to conduct a routine annual inspection.
By the time they had left, according to owner Abe Osina, the inspectors had spewed a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks at the staff of the largely Jewish home–including criticizing the staff for not giving residents a choice of eating pork–and cited the facility for an array of violations.
“The inspectors were saying, `Those Jews, they’re so cheap!’ ” recalled Polish immigrant Maria Lasko, head cook in the home that keeps a strict kosher kitchen under Jewish dietary rules.
“They were asking why residents weren’t getting milk at a meal. I tried to explain Jewish religion says you don’t eat meat and milk together.”
Now, the state has agreed to pay a $250,000 judgment to Osina and the facility because of the incident. Legal scholars say the case reinforces a citizen’s constitutional right to sue public officials for abridgment of freedom of religion,
Osina, whose family has owned the home for four decades, said his legal expenses from the suit he filed in federal court against the state employees will eat up all the judgment money. But he said the judgment is a victory in principle: His parents are Holocaust survivors, and he felt honor-bound to make the state pay for the inspection team’s blatant religious prejudice.
“I couldn’t believe I was hearing such things, in Chicago, in 1991,” Osina said.
Gary Starkman, a lawyer hired by the state to represent the employees, said he remains convinced that they are innocent, even though Public Health Department officials quickly overruled the inspection team’s findings after Osina’s lawyer complained.
In September, Starkman filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Chicago agreeing to the $250,000 award. State accountants are currently preparing to issue checks to Osina and the home.
Starkman said that the state folded its hand only to avoid the considerably higher cost of going to trial, as he was prepared to do.
“Most of these charges were made up, I believe,” Starkman said. “I would have wanted to hear their witnesses under oath in court.”
Howard Hoffman, the nursing home’s attorney, rejected Starkman’s interpretation.
“If the case had been settled for $2,500, you could’ve said that the state was buying itself out of a nuisance suit,” said Hoffman of the Chicago law firm of Holleb & Coff. “Twenty-five thousand dollars and you could say they were prudently trying to save money. But $250,000–that’s a lot of the taxpayers’ money just to keep what happened from coming out in court.”
In their official report, the state’s inspectors cited the home for not providing a varied diet. They had told patients they had the right to demand pork–a non-kosher meat. At the time of the incident, 80 percent of Sherwin Manor’s residents were Jewish.
According to Jill Johnson, the home’s director of nursing, the state’s inspectors didn’t confine themselves to anti-Semitic remarks. She said that the team, composed of professional nurses, denigrated Lasko’s kitchen assistant, a recent immigrant, as one of those “Polacks who can’t speak or read English.”
When a federal appeals court reinstated Osina’s suit after it was dismissed by a lower court judge, the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the high court declined to hear the appeal, letting stand the appellate ruling that Osina be allowed to proceed with the suit.
Sources in the nursing-home industry say the incident isn’t an isolated one, citing similar cases of race-baiting by nursing home inspectors. The state attorney general’s office could not immediately determine whether the state had paid awards in any similar cases.
Tom Schafer, a Public Health Department spokesman, said that the personnel files of defendants in the Sherwin Manor case do not contain complaints of similar abuses during other inspections.
A key member of its inspection team and a defendant in the Sherwin Manor suit, Judith McAuliffe, is the widow of former state Rep. Roger McAuliffe (R-Chicago) and the mother of current Rep. Michael McAuliffe (R-Chicago).
Judith McAuliffe could not be reached for comment. Several of her co-defendants declined to comment.
At the time of the 1991 incident, Sherwin Manor, 7350 N. Sheridan Rd., was a highly regarded facility, rewarded with extra funding from the Illinois Department of Public Aid because of the quality of its patient care, according to court documents. It had passed previous inspections with top marks.
But on that occasion in 1991, the state’s inspectors found fault everywhere, recalled Osina. He said they even accused him of not informing new residents that they were entering a kosher facility.
“I took off my yarmulke, and said, `You mean people can’t see I’m Jewish,’ ” Osina said. “Those inspectors came in here determined to crucify us.”
Osina’s attorney said he thinks the treatment his client received was triggered by a case then in the news. Another nursing home operator, who also happened to be Jewish, had been exposed as operating substandard facilities. The state’s inspectors may have been predisposed to prove the same of Osina, Hoffman contended.
In their report, the state’s inspectors wrote Sherwin Manor up for serving one color of Jell-O when the day’s menu called for another. They also criticized the kitchen staff for using black pepper in a recipe that specified white pepper.
“We were prepared to put an expert witness on the stand to testify that there’s no nutritional difference between red and green Jell-O,” Hoffman said. “As far as I know, white and black pepper are equally kosher.”
When the inspectors’ report was filed, Hoffman protested to higher officials in the Public Health Department. The department speedily overruled most of its inspectors’ findings. That pre-empted the possibility of Sherwin Manor’s license being revoked.
Still, Osina insisted on seeking further relief in the courts, even after the original federal judge in the case dismissed the suit. But that ruling was rejected by a federal appeals court, which ordered that Osina be allowed to proceed with his suit. The State of Illinois then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case, allowing the appeals court decision to stand.
Osina and his employees said they feel vindicated, if exhausted, by the long struggle. Kay Haywood, the home’s activity director, said she thinks it was important to take the case to court. As an African-American, she remembers a time when black people were regularly subject to prejudice.
“Those inspectors came in here just not liking Jewish people,” Haywood said, “and that’s just not right.”
