Donors of AIDS Unit Still Hope Cedars-Sinai Will Accept Gift

Donors who offered to endow a $2.5-million AIDS treatment unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Friday that they plan to proceed with their gift in the memory of late University of California regent Sheldon Andelson despite strong objections by factions within the hospital.

Arlen Andelson, a brother of the prominent gay political figure who died of complications of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1987, had proposed naming the 22-bed unit and outpatient clinic for the late regent.

Arlen Andelson, a lawyer and a director of the West Hollywood-based Bank of Los Angeles, said he and other donors who began working with the medical center last year on the project were unaware of brewing opposition until this week.

“We are still in very positive discussions with Cedars,” Arlen Andelson said. “I was surprised by (this week’s) vote and the attitude of the surgeons. I hope it does not reflect the feelings of the hospital.”

Debate within the hospital became public Wednesday just before an advisory vote by committees representing hospital surgeons and doctors in the department of obstetrics and gynecology. Both committees voted to reject the proposal, citing concerns over the space, manpower and financing the unit would require.

Four other departments have supported the unit, which is due for a final advisory vote by the hospital’s medical executive committee on Monday. The board of directors, which has final say over the plan, is expected to act in April.

Andelson said he is pressing ahead with negotiations over the unit’s finances and organization.

“My hope,” he said, “is that this will be a complete center covering the medical needs, the social needs, the psychiatric needs, the ambulatory-care needs (of AIDS patients) . . . and aid in research.”

He said the goal is to make it “one of the foremost places in the country, or the world, to offer these kinds of services.”

Andelson’s brother, who was also a lawyer and a national Democratic Party fund-raiser who publicly disclosed his homosexuality in 1979, was eulogized after his death by U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) as “a pioneer in national politics on the issue of gay and lesbian rights.” Sheldon Andelson, who was 56 when he died, was also credited with helping to legitimize gay rights.

Although Sheldon Andelson did not call for creation of such a unit in his will, Arlen Andelson, executor of his brother’s estate, entered serious discussions with Cedars-Sinai less than a year after his brother’s death. Other prospective donors are Arlen Andelson’s wife Michele and Marc and Jane Nathanson, prominent Los Angeles activists and fund-raisers who would donate half of the seed money for the unit.

‘We Need to Work’

Marc Nathanson said the donors stepped forward after watching Andelson and others succumb to complications of AIDS. “I think everybody has known people who have had the disease or been affected by the disease,” he said. “We need to work on this disease just as we have worked on polio and continue to work on cancer.”

If Cedars-Sinai votes to reject the plan, he said, the donors will probably seek another Los Angeles-area hospital for consideration.

The $2.5-million donation offer reportedly made to the hospital has not been nailed down because of continued talks over the financing of the unit. Nathanson expressed hope, however, that Cedars-Sinai could qualify for at least that much in additional federal funding. More money might be collected through future private fund-raising efforts.

Among the unit’s features, Nathanson said, would be psychological and psychiatric support for AIDS victims and their families. That support also would be extended, if possible, to Los Angeles-area nurses, doctors and psychologists who work with the traumas caused by AIDS.