Short answers, pulled from the story.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine was founded in 1953 and welcomed its first class of 56 students on the 12th of September 1955. It was the first new medical school to open in New York City since 1897 and the first in the United States to open under Jewish auspices.
Albert Einstein agreed to lend his name at a gathering marking his 74th birthday on the 14th of March 1953, after initially refusing and suggesting the school be named for the physician Maimonides instead. He had previously declined to have his name used by Brandeis University and had turned down the offer to become the second president of Israel. He praised the school for welcoming students of all creeds and races.
In 2024, Ruth Gottesman, a long-time professor at the school and chair of its board of trustees, donated one billion dollars on the condition that tuition be permanently eliminated for all MD students. The New York Times described the gift as likely the largest donation ever made to a medical school.
The acceptance rate for Einstein's MD program was 1.85 percent in 2024, making it one of the most selective medical schools in the United States. As of 2025, the school enrolled 789 medical students.
Yeshiva University's mounting financial difficulties, which included a $110 million loss in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in 2008 and Einstein's high operational costs, led to the transfer of the medical school to Montefiore in 2015. Under the agreement, Montefiore holds 51 percent ownership and Yeshiva holds 49 percent, with Montefiore assuming all operational and financial responsibilities.
Einstein is the site of the first successful coronary artery bypass surgery, performed in 1960 by a team led by Robert H. Goetz. The school also hosted the first description of pediatric HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the first structural characterization of hemoglobin A1c by Samuel Rahbar and Helen Ranney in 1968, and the first genetic manipulation of Mycobacterium by William Jacobs Jr.