Ben Abramovice, one of the best friends Bay Area Jewish seniors ever had, has died.
The former director of Oakland’s Home for Jewish Parents and the Jewish Home for the Aged in San Francisco lost his battle with Parkinson’s disease and cancer on Sept. 10. He was 73 and died in the very Jewish Home he championed.
Among his many accomplishments, Abramovice wrote the book on senior care. Literally. His “Long Term Care Administration: The Management of Institutional and Non-Institutional Components of the Continuum of Care” is still a standard text in the field.
“He inspired so many in long term care,” says Anne Rosenthal, director of community services at Reutlinger Jewish Community in Danville. “Before it became fashionable, he understood the vitality of older people and how the later stage of life can be just as fulfilling as the early stages.”
Abramovice hired Rosenthal out of graduate school 30 years ago to work with the precursor to the Reutlinger Community: the Home for Jewish Parents.
In his career, he also served as director of Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, as acting director of the San Francisco Health Department, and as founder of the Lifespan Corp., a consulting firm dedicated to improvement of health care of the elderly. He was also a policy scholar at the Institute for Health and Aging at U.C. San Francisco.
Adds Rosenthal, “Ben was a very colorful figure and creative thinker. He would see beyond the traditional possibilities and move on innovative ways of solving problems.”
Born in Chicago and raised in the East Bay, Abramovice was a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and, later, the University of Chicago. From the early 1960s on, he focused on senior care, starting with the Jewish Home for the Aged.
He retired in 1987 after several years at Laguna Honda Hospital, where he won numerous commendations for improving the hospital’s patient care programs.
In addition to his professional work for Jewish seniors, he was also active in the Jewish community, having served on the planning committee of the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay (he even met former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir through his fundraising efforts).
Despite the veneer of sober professionalism, Abramovice was a true bon vivant. “Women adored him,” recalls Rosenthal. “He lived on Nob Hill. He was a friend of [poet Lawrence] Ferlinghetti. He was a real North Beach aficionado.”
Abramovice loved the cultural life of the Bay Area. He was an amateur jazz musician, novelist and film buff, even helping produce a few independent films, including “The Great San Francisco Race: The Bay to Breakers,” which is now part of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
In everything he did, Abramovice maintained the highest integrity. “He was a man of tremendous ethics,” says Rosenthal, “with a moral compass that I use to this day. He never spoke ill of people. In his book, everyone counted.”
Ben Abramovice is survived by his sister, Luise N. Healey of Irvine; her husband, Patrick Healey; and their son, Sean Healey of Broomfield, Colo.