They’ve Waited Patiently, but Still No Takers : Elder care: Lake Forest Nursing Center built a wing exclusively for Jews--the only such facility in the county. Now, 30 days after opening, it still has no residents.

Nearly a month has passed since the Lake Forest Nursing Center opened its 22-bed L’Chaim Wing.

The walls are adorned with Jewish calendars. Each door frame sports a ceramic mezuza. And soon Jewish paintings will decorate the wing’s long lonely corridor.

“There’s a very big need for this,” says Shiffy Crane, the nursing home’s director of activities, who is Jewish. “While a (Jewish) person is here, we want them feel supported by their community.”

Thirty days after opening its doors, however, only one thing is missing from the sole Orange County nursing facility to cater exclusively to Jews: any sign of residents. “We expected that it would take some time to see it full,” explains Rosemarie Kubba, the center’s director of marketing.

Planning for the new wing began about 18 months ago, Kubba said, after the 175-bed nursing home was approached by a group of Jews who argued that there was a crying need for a separate place to cater to elderly members of their community. An investigation--including interviews with numerous local Jewish leaders and health care officials--confirmed such a need, Kubba said. And the idea dovetailed nicely with the center’s own desire to improve its sagging patient count by offering specialized services likely to give it an edge in a competitive marketplace.

Among other things, Kubba said, the L’Chaim Wing (named for a Hebrew phrase that means to life ) will serve kosher-style food, offer observances of all Jewish holidays, host Jewish-oriented classes and discussion groups and feature weekly visits by a local rabbi.

Unlike some other religious orientations, Crane said, Judaism is as much a lifestyle as it is a religion. And because Orange County has only recently begun to experience a significant influx of Jews, she said, elderly Jewish people in need of nursing care have had no place to go to be with others of similar background.

Being in a Jewish environment, Crane said, can be “extremely important to the healing process.”

Yet pleas to members of the nursing home’s Jewish population now in other wings have so far produced no volunteers for transfer. And a flurry of newspaper ads, brochures, press releases and word-of-mouth publicity has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

Kubba and Crane attribute the response to a number of factors. Word of the new wing has not had time to spread sufficiently, they contend. And some Jews, they say, may feel uncomfortable at the thought of living in an exclusively Jewish environment where they suppose (wrongly, according to the two administrators) that Jewish practices will be strictly imposed.

Yet Kubba and Crane say they feel confident of ultimate success. “Two years from now if we still don’t have any clients, we might reconsider,” Kubba says.

Over at the other end of the building, meanwhile, one of the Jewish residents who said no articulated a reason for her decision that probably didn’t even figure into the administrators’ planning: “I just don’t want to,” says Rena Haimes, 92, who before coming to the center had lived in the same apartment for 32 years. Changing rooms, she says, necessitates the unpleasant burden of rearranging your clothing. “I just want to stay put.”