Samuel Gottesman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people named David Gottesman, see David Gottesman (disambiguation).

David Samuel Gottesman (1885 – April 21, 1956), was a Hungarian-born, American pulp-paper merchant, financier and philanthropist. He generally went by Samuel Gottesman or D. Samuel Gottesman.

Contents 1 Pulp-paper 2 Banking 3 Philanthropy 4 Family

[edit] Pulp-paper

Born to Mendel and Sarah, née Fischgrund, in Munkacs, Hungary in 1885, Gottesman emigrated to the United States as a child and later joined his father's paper business, M. Gottesman & Company, which he had founded in 1886, in New York City. He went on to transform the firm into the Central National-Gottesman Inc, a billion-dollar pulp-and-paper company. In 1984, long after Gottesman's death, the company acquired Lindenmeyr Paper Corporation, a leading publishing-paper merchant. 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, including the D. Samuel Gottesman Library at Yeshiva University's, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City.

One of his highest-profile gifts, was the donation of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls to the State of Israel, where 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 on several basis, including that Bartos was Celeste Bartos' husband. Nevertheless, Bartos and Kiesler designed the structure which was completed in 1965.

[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.