Bruce Slovin, a corporate executive who united five organizations devoted to various aspects of the Jewish experience to create the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, died on Aug. 10 in Poughkeepsie, New York, near his weekend home in Rhinebeck. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by an aortic dissection, said Tracy Schmidt, his executive assistant at 1 Eleven Associates, the private investment and real estate firm where he served as president.
When the center opened in 2000, it offered scholars, researchers and others curious about Jewish history a single place to delve into a massive repository of documents, photographs, books, artworks, film and artifacts from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Yeshiva University Museum and the American Sephardi Federation.
“I’m just smart enough to understand the need to have a history,” Slovin told the New York Jewish Week newspaper in 2011. “As a people as valuable to humankind as the Jewish people are, it seemed dead wrong not to have as much of history as we can save — and we have tons more work to do.”
The organizations’ collections include the handwritten original of Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” which is engraved on a plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty; the first Hebrew prayer books in America; correspondence signed by Jewish luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Sholem Aleichem; and a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the oldest Jewish congregation in New York.
Slovin was introduced to the world of Jewish archives in the mid-1980s when he attended a board meeting at YIVO. The men there reminded him of his father and grandfather, who had recently died. “They would drink schnapps after they had the board meeting,” he said in 2011. “They were great storytellers. My father and grandfather were alive again.”
But it became clear that YIVO’s delicate trove of papers, which detail the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry, was deteriorating in its building at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, which lacked air-conditioning.
He was named the chair of YIVO’s board in 1985, while he had a day job as the president of MacAndrews & Forbes, the corporate raider Ronald O. Perelman’s mini-conglomerate and holding company.
Slovin’s main goal at YIVO was to find the organization a new home. But he was encouraged by a friend, Joe Greenberger, a lawyer and YIVO board member, to add other Jewish institutions to his plan.
Over the next 15 years, Slovin roped in four more organizations and assured them of their continued existence; raised about $100 million to build and maintain the center, on 16th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues; and secured a letter of credit from a bank that backed $30 million in tax-exempt bonds to support construction of the center when fundraising was in its early stages.
“Bruce himself was probably the most generous person of all to the center,” Amy Goldman Fowler, a former chair of the center, said in an interview. “He would step in as needed. He was always helping with a shortfall.”
His typical pitch to donors was simple, Michele Tocci, a board member, said: “So how much are you giving this year?”
The center, which holds lectures, programs and exhibitions, is probably best known for an ongoing exhibition that opened in January and features a full-scale recreation of the rooms in a secret annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank, her parents, sister and other inhabitants hid before the Nazis captured them in August 1944.
Bruce Elliott Slovin was born Dec. 10, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, was an apparel manufacturer; his mother, Arnie (Sebolsky) Slovin, was a bookkeeper for the business. After World War II, his father moved the family to Mount Vernon, in Westchester County.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Slovin earned his juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1960. He spent a few years in private practice before being hired in 1965 as an executive at Kane-Miller Corp., a food distribution company that he helped build through acquisitions. Nine years later, he left to work at Hanson Industries, a conglomerate based in Britain, where he also focused on buying companies.
Perelman hired Slovin in 1980 as vice chair of MacAndrews & Forbes; he was also an executive of the companies it acquired, including Revlon and the supermarket chain Pantry Pride.
Slovin retired from MacAndrews & Forbes in 2000, but continued as chair of the Center for Jewish History until 2011, a period during which it flirted with a merger with New York University. But more important, in the midst of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, he started a fundraising push to pay off the center’s $30 million debt in 2011, to avoid the onerous terms involved in renewing the letter of credit.
Slovin had asked two of the center’s board members, William A. Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, and Joseph S. Steinberg, the head of a financial services firm, to lead the fundraising campaign, which reached its goal in 15 months.
Settling its debt satisfied concerns voiced by one of the center’s most vocal critics, Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, the former home of the American Jewish Historical Society. Sarna had once suggested that the money should have been spent on scanning the documents belonging to the five organizations rather than on erecting a building.
“It seemed to me, at the time, that using expensive New York real estate to house paper was not the best use of the Jewish community’s money,” he said in an interview. “But that was a long time ago and, over time, the center has proved itself. New York is fortunate to have it. It’s a great tribute to Bruce that he made it happen.”
Slovin, who lived primarily in Manhattan, is survived by his sons, Karl and Eric, from his marriage to Rochelle Shaw, which ended in divorce; a daughter, Karen French, from his marriage to Francesca Cernia, which ended with her death in 2017; five grandchildren; a sister, Barbara Emrich; and a brother, Ira.
Fundraising seemed to come naturally to Slovin, even as a boy.
While attending an Orthodox Jewish school, he told CUNY TV in an interview in 2011, he camped out at the Myrtle Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, where he collected money in two charity boxes, called pushkes, for the Jewish National Fund.
He won so many miniature Torahs for raising the most money, he said, that he was eventually banned from the competition.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
