Samuel Gottesman
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David Samuel Gottesman (b. Hungary, 1885 – d. USA, 1956), American pulp-paper merchant, financier and philanthropist
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[edit] Pulp-paper
Gottesman came to the USA as a baby and, when a young man, joined the family business, M. Gottesman & Company (founded in 1985) in New York City. The company sold raw materials for papermaking. He went on to transform the firm into the Central National-Gottesman Inc, a billion-dollar pulp-and-paper company. 1984, long after Gottesman's death, the holding company acquired Lindenmeyr Paper Corporation, one of today's leading publishing-paper merchants. Retaining the name Central National-Gottesman today, it also acquired Perkins & Squire Company, a seller of book-publishing papers, in 1998, and D.F. Monroe.
[edit] Banking
He was also active as a successful investment banker and was an organizer of the Central National Bank in New York City, which eventually was subsumed through a large number of sequential mergers into what is today the JPMorgan Chase & Co. financial institution. He was also the director of the Eastern Corporation and of Rayonier Inc.
[edit] Philanthropy
He is best known for his generous philanthropy. His monetary gifts extended to the New York Public Library and numerous Jewish organizations and institutions. One is the D. Samuel Gottsman Library of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
One of his high-profile gifts was the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls to the State of Israel. They are housed in the Shrine of the Book. The shrine, located adjacent to the Israel Museum in western Jerusalem, was paid for by a foundation established by Gottesman's children as a memorial to their father. However, the architects, chosen (or at least condoned) by Gottesman himself before he died or appointed by his daughter Celeste Ruth Bartos, were not embraced by the Israeli architectural establishment. The indigenous architects opposed the choice of architects Armand Phillip Bartos and Frederick John Kiesler. The least of the objections centered on Bartos, the husband of Celeste, whose appointment was evidently based on nepotism. Nevertheless, Bartos and Kiesler designed the structure that was completed in 1965. See Shrine of the Book.
[edit] Family
His wife died of cancer in 1942 at age 49, a year after his granddaughter Jenifer was born. She likewise died of cancer, in 1991.
Earlier on, Celeste Ruth Gottesman had married Jerome John Altman in 1935, divorced him and married Bartos. Due to the inheritance of her father's estate, she is a wealthy modern-art collector and museum and library benefactor, who resides in New York City. (See Armand Phillip Bartos concerning the couple's family and philanthropic activities.)
In addition to the Bartos's own eponymous foundations, Mrs. Bartos established the Pinewood Foundation in 1958, named after her father's estate in Lawrence, Long Island, New York.
