April 19, 1985

The Federal Government said yesterday that it was planning to deny nearly $22 million in Medicaid funds to a state center on Staten Island for the retarded and disabled on the ground that the center, formerly known as Willowbrook, had violated many Federal health and safety standards. Federal officials said the violations included a lack of sufficient food for patients, many of whom cannot feed themselves; inadequate treatment and therapy programs, and substandard living and bathing facilities. The violations recalled those cited in 1972 that led to a Federal Court decision requiring the state to improve conditions and reduce overcrowding at Willowbrook. In a pledge last year to close the antiquated main building of the center, Governor Cuomo described it as ''once a national symbol of neglect and callousness.''

Sometimes it seems there is no Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, not the way there is a Greenwich Village in Manhattan or a Middle Village in Queens. Bed-Stuy, as the area is commonly known, has a definite nucleus - the busy corner of Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street has been called its Times Square - and, in Flushing Avenue and Broadway, firm northern and eastern boundaries. But where it melts into Crown Heights on the south and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill on the west, Bed-Stuy's edges seem as fluid as an amoeba's. And residents complain that the community is defined not by geography, but by social pathology and race. Whether the boundaries are those used by the City Planning Commission or the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which respectively estimate the population at 136,000 and at least 400,000 of Brooklyn's 723,000 blacks, by all counts Bed-Stuy, which is 90 percent black, is the second-largest black community in the country, after Chicago's South Side.

President Reagan, standing by his decision to lay a wreath at a German military cemetery next month, said today that most of the soldiers buried there were as much victims of the Nazis as the inmates of the concentration camps. The President's remarks immediately stirred a new burst of criticism from American Jewish groups and others, who reiterated demands that he cancel the cemetery visit. ''I think that there is nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis,'' Mr. Reagan said. ''They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.''

Major institutional shareholders of the Unocal Corporation have reacted negatively to the oil company's defensive maneuver to avoid a takeover by T. Boone Pickens. Several of them said yesterday that they would probably tender their shares to the investor group led by Mr. Pickens rather than pledge them to Unocal in an offer that may never be activated. Mr. Pickens, through an investment group called Mesa Partners II, has offered to purchase 64 million shares of Unocal for $54 a share. If successful, the bid would give the group 50.1 percent of Unocal's 173.7 million shares outstanding.

In a strategic move to bolster lagging earnings and to position itself for the future, the Manufacturers Hanover Corporation, the nation's fourth- largest bank holding company, yesterday announced a reorganization plan. Under that plan, the highly centralized company will be broken into five distinct units, each a separate profit center headed by its own sector executive vice president. John F. McGillicuddy, the company's 54-year-old chairman, said yesterday that the reorganization should result in greater profits, but added that it was premature to predict how much earnings would be improved, or when. ''In all fairness to those five people who have just been brought into the loop, it will take some time.''