RESEDA : Home for Aging Troubled by Financial Woes

At the Grancell Village Jewish Home for the Aging, they threw a party Thursday, just as they do every month in a place where the average age is 90 and passing age 100 hardly causes a stir.

But though the songs and cake for 104-year-old Rachel Cohn and others were the same, times have changed for the nonprofit institution that runs it.

For the first time in recent memory, the 81-year-old Jewish Home for the Aging of Greater Los Angeles ended in the red this fiscal year, forcing officials to forge links with the San Fernando Valley Jewish community, said Michael Turner, spokesman for the home.

Turner said the $800,000 deficit, which he attributed to rising health-care costs and a reduction in contributions, was compounded by new demands on the 750-resident home, which has two campuses in Reseda, Grancell Village and Eisenberg Village. The shortfall has spurred cutbacks in programs and layoffs of five administrative positions, he said.

The home has an annual operating budget of about $21 million, $14 million of which is from Medicare reimbursements. The remainder is from donations, he said.

One response to the shortfall has been the creation of the Valley Jewish Business Leaders Assn., said Martin M. Cooper, owner of a Woodland Hills public relations firm and the new group’s president. The group, organized in January, serves as a fund-raising base for the Jewish Home and as an organization to help establish contacts between Jewish businesses in the Valley. Its leaders said membership has risen to about 200 this month.