The Straus brothers made and donated fortunes

By Joe Spier

Joe Spier
Joe Spier

CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — Isidor Straus was born in Otterberg, Bavaria in 1845 and his brother Nathan in 1848. They were the sons of Lazarus Straus, an observant Jew. Lazarus emigrated to the U.S. in 1852, settling in Talbotton, Georgia where he started out as a pushcart peddler and then established a general store although he was not allowed to own it because Jews could not own businesses there. His wife and children joined him in 1854.

Isidor and Nathan were educated in a local log cabin public school. As there were no other Jews or a synagogue in Talbotton, Lazarus sent his sons to a Baptist Sunday School where they learned the Old Testament.

Isidor intended to enter West Point but then in 1861, eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and the American Civil War broke out. It may seem surprising that Jewish families supported the cause of slavery and the Confederacy but most Southern Jewish families did including the Strauses. Isidor, then 16, volunteered for the Confederate army but was informed that the Confederacy did not have the guns sufficient to arm its men and wanted no boys. The only thing left for Isidor to do was to enter his father’s store and take the place of a clerk who had joined the Southern Army. There he remained for two years after which he was commissioned as an aide to a Confederate agent to go to Europe to acquire ships to run the Union blockade. While overseas, the plan was abandoned and Isidor was stranded with his life-savings of $1,200, which he used to trade Confederate bonds on the Amsterdam and London exchanges. Isidor returned home with $12,000, investing acumen that was a portent of things to come.

Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the Straus family moved to New York City where Isidor and Nathan set up a crockery and glassware business in the basement of Macy’s department store. In 1888, they purchased a part interest in the store and acquired full ownership in 1896. Isidor was the business brains and Nathan the idea man. The brothers introduced underselling and the use of odd prices. Their innovative management built Macy’s into the largest department store in the world and along the way Isidor and Nathan became fabulously wealthy and a part of “Our Crowd” the great German-Jewish families of New York.

In 1871, Isidor married Ida Blun and in 1875, Nathan followed when he married Lina Gutherz. Isidor and Ida would have seven children, Nathan, and Lina, six.

Not only in business but also in public service and in philanthropy, Isidor and Nathan would make their marks.Isidor served as a U.S. Congressman and as a member of its Ways and Means Committee.

A warm friend of President Grover Cleveland, Isidor declined the office of Postmaster General. Isidor was a founding member of the American-Jewish Committee, President of the Jewish Educational Alliance and creator of an endowment fund for the Jewish Theological Seminary. He served as Vice-President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the J. Hood Wright Memorial Hospital.

Nathan served as New York City Park Commissioner and President of the New York City Board of Health. He was a generous financial supporter of the New York Public Library. But the death of his infant daughter Sara from drinking bad milk was the catalyst for Nathan embarking on his great humanitarian achievement of saving babies lives, not a few but a few hundred thousand. At that time the connection between pasteurization and preventing illnesses from infected milk was not yet widely understood but Nathan learned that pasteurization was crucial to the well-being of children. Nathan built a milk pasteurization laboratory and then established depots around New York where the poor could have access to healthy milk. Farmers, unhappy that their unpasteurized product was being maligned as unsafe, had Nathan indicted on a charge of adulterating milk. Convicted, he received a suspended sentence, but undeterred, Nathan continued to establish pasteurized milk stations at his own expense around the City and eventually in 36 cities, 297 stations in all, paying for them himself. The project lasted for a quarter century. Ultimately, laws were passed requiring all milk to be pasteurized.

In 1912, Isidor, Nathan and their wives were touring Europe when Nathan suggested that they visit Palestine. At that time Palestine was a desert except for those parts that were mosquito-infested swampland. Its population suffered from disease, poverty and famine, yet the brothers had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren. After a week, 67-year-old Isidor had enough. “How many camels, hovels and yeshivas can you see? It’s time to go.” But Nathan, a younger 64 and more enthusiastic, wanted to stay. “We can’t leave now,” he protested. “Look how much work has to be done here. We have to help. We have the means to help. We can’t turn our backs on our people.” To this, Isidor retorted, “So, we’ll send money. I just want to get out of here.” Nathan and Lina remained while Isidor and Ida returned to Europe. In England, Isidor booked passage for him and his brother on a ship sailing home to America and cabled Nathan, “You must leave Palestine NOW. I have made reservations for you and if you don’t get here soon you will miss the boat.” Nathan delayed and by the time he reached London on April 12, the liner had already sailed with Isidor and Ida on board.

Four days into the crossing, in the North Atlantic, at 23:40 on April 14, 1912, the liner struck an iceberg. RMS Titanic was doomed.

On the night of the sinking, Isidor and Ida were seen standing near Lifeboat No. 8. The officer in charge prompted the elderly couple to board but Isidor refused so long as there were women remaining on the ship. He urged Ida to get into the lifeboat but she also refused, saying, “I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so will we die together.” Those already in the lifeboat witnessed her words. Isidor and Ida were last seen on Titanic’s boat deck sitting together quietly in deck chairs holding hands when a huge wave washed over them.

On that fateful night, of the 2,228 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, 1,523 perished. The ship took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink, ample time for all to escape had there been sufficient lifeboats. There were not. Only lifeboats for less than half of the people on board as the builders and owners of the Titanic believed her to be unsinkable. It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history.

There is no exact count of the number of Jewish passengers on board the Titanic. There were enough to merit the hiring of a kosher chef. Based on Jewish sounding names from the ship’s passenger manifest, it is estimated that there were about 85.

Chartered to recover as many of Titanic’s dead as possible, the British cable ship Mackay-Bennett recovered Isidor’s body and brought it to Halifax for identification before being shipped to New York. After a quiet funeral at the family residence, Isidor was buried in Brooklyn’s Beth-El Cemetery. Ida’s body was never recovered. A public memorial service to honor the memory of Isidor and Ida Straus was later held at Carnegie Hall. A crowd of thousands filled the hall to capacity and overflowed onto the street.

Nathan, grief-stricken and deeply mourning his brother and sister-in-law, resigned from Macy’s and from all active business. Believing that he had been spared by divine intervention and for a purpose, Nathan devoted the rest of his life, with an intensity unrivaled in its time, to the pursuit of philanthropic activities, mainly in Palestine. The last two decades of Nathan’s life became filled with Zionism as he said, “Others may be better able than I to talk about Zionism, but none can feel it more deeply than I.”

In Palestine, Nathan established a domestic science school for girls, a health bureau to fight malaria and trachoma and a free public kitchen. He opened a Pasteur Institute, child health welfare stations and then funded the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, each building containing a cornerstone which reads at Nathan’s direction in English, Hebrew and Arabic, “For the benefit of all inhabitants of the land, Christian, Moslem and Jew.” It is estimated that Nathan devoted two-thirds of his fortune to helping Palestine. When asked why, Nathan repeated a Talmudic saying, “When you give at death it is lead, when you give in sickness it is silver but when you give in health it is gold.”

The modern Israeli coastal city of Netanya, founded in 1929, is named after Nathan Straus, as is a street in central Jerusalem, “Rehov Straus”.

Nathan Straus died on January 11, 1931 in New York City. Some 3,500 men and women crowded into Temple Emanu-El for his funeral and perhaps twice as many stood outside. Twenty years before, at a dinner in his honor, Nathan delivered what could have been his own eulogy, “I often think of the old saying, ‘The world is my country, to do good is my religion’. This has been an inspiration to me.”

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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history.  You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com.  Comments below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and his or her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)

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