Maurice Tempelsman
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Maurice Tempelsman (born August 26, 1929, Antwerp, Belgium) is an Belgian-American diamond merchant and industrialist. He moved to the United States as a child. He attended New York University.
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[edit] Family life
He has three children by his estranged wife, Lilly Tempelsman, but was the long-time companion of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, former First Lady of the United States. The two began their relationship in the late 1970s, shortly after the death of Jackie's wealthy second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Tempelsman was also an active fundraiser for the Democratic Party.
Tempelsman soon moved into Jackie's magnificent Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. The couple frequently took walks through Central Park and were photographed doing so in the final days of Jackie's life. Onassis died May 19, 1994, of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, aged 64. He read a poem during the funeral service for the former First Lady.
After the former First Lady's death, Tempelsman became more of a "father figure" to Jackie's surviving children: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John F. Kennedy Jr..
[edit] Lilly Tempelsman
Lilly Bucholz, a Polish Jewish refugee from the Nazis married Maurice Tempelsman at the age of 17 in the late 1940s. Her father also was a diamond merchant, which may explain how the couple met.
After her husband left her for Jackie Kennedy Lilly Tempelsman became a social worker with the Jewish Board of Family & Child Services. She currently (as of 2007) is the program coordinator for the Compeer program, a program which, through the auspices of the Jewish Board and the UJA Federation of New York "matches volunteers one-to-one, with a recovering mentally ill adult who is in need of a friend" (see [1]).
[edit] The acroliths
For information about several Greek acroliths (probably looted in Sicily) - marble heads, hands and feet - of statues of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone which were sold to the New York collector Maurice Tempelsman in 1980 for more than $1 million and which have become the subject of investigation by the Italian government see Culture Without Context, the newsletter of the Illicit Antiquities Research Center (see[2]).
[edit] The blood diamonds
For allegations about his involvement with so-called "blood diamonds" see the following at Mines & Communities website ([3]), CorpWatch ([4]) and([5]).
