Bernard Bergman

Bernard Bergman (September 2, 1911 – June 16, 1984) was an Orthodox Rabbi who was best known for his operation of a large network of nursing homes and his conviction of Medicaid fraud in 1976. Bergman turned an inheritance of $25,000 into an empire of nursing homes valued at $24 million.

Bergman was born to Shlomo Bergman and Gittel Leifer on September 2, 1911, in Romania. Shlomo was the son of Rabbi Avraham Tzvi Bergman (1849–1918), Rabbi of Yasinya, a small town in what was then Maramureş, Hungary, now part of Zakarpattya, Ukraine. Gittel descended from a long line of Hasidic rabbis, most famous of whom was her grandfather, Rabbi Mordechai Leifer of Nadvorna. The family immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, living in Brooklyn. Bergman went to what was then Palestine. There, he attended the Hebron Yeshiva in order to pursue his religious studies. He received his rabbinic ordination from the academy's Dean, Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, on October 22, 1933. He married the former Anne Weiss in 1937. Back in New York City, he took a position as a rabbi at a nursing home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and served as editor and publisher of the Yiddish-language daily The Jewish Morning Journal and head of Hapoel HaMizrachi.

He started to build his network of nursing homes in the 1960s, with the former New York Cancer Hospital on Central Park West at 106th Street was acquired in 1955 and operated by Bergman as the Towers Nursing Home. The home became the center of federal and state fraud charges. Claims were made that patients in the home were abused and neglected, with residents testifying that they had not been given adequate heat and had been subjected to physical abuse and pest infestations. The site was closed in 1974 as a nursing home.

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