As a child, Bruce Slovin stood every Friday at the Myrtle Avenue Station in Brooklyn holding two Jewish National Fund pushkes, the trademark blue charity boxes. At the Orthodox Jewish school he attended, whichever student raised the most money was rewarded with a miniature Torah. After attaining a massive collection of these tiny scrolls, he was banned from the competition for winning too much. 

Those were the roots of his philanthropic life.

Slovin, a lawyer, businessman and Jewish philanthropist who was the mastermind and founding chairman of the Center for Jewish History, died on Sunday at 89. 

Born in 1935 to a Russian and Polish family, Slovin grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended religious school and public school — the start of a life spent bridging worlds.

Slovin’s mother wanted him to become a dentist, but he fell into law, receiving his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1957 and a J.D. from Harvard University in 1960, figuring it would give him the foundations he needed in life. 

Soon though, Slovin shifted from real estate law into finance, befriending investor Ronald Perelman, and serving as president of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings and the Revlon Group.

In 1985, during a nighttime stroll down Park Avenue, a lawyer friend asked Slovin what he did in the Jewish world. “Not really very much,” Slovin replied, as he recalled in a 2011 interview with Building New York.

His friend then invited him to a board meeting for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which was struggling financially at the time. “What I found, on this board of YIVO, was a continuation of my grandfather and father,” Slovin said in 2011. Both had passed away recently.

In the decade and a half that followed, Slovin almost single-handedly saved YIVO from financial demise, Allan Nadler, who worked at YIVO between 1991 and 1999, serving as director of research and executive director, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Before Slovin joined the board of trustees, YIVO had “mothballed itself,” Jonathan Brent, executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, told eJP. “It was essentially an organization that had a tremendous archive, a priceless library, but was, to a great extent, backward-looking, which was not YIVO’s initial mission. YIVO’s initial mission was never to simply look back nostalgically at 1,000 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe. It was to use that history to move the Jewish people forward,” he said.

Today, YIVO is celebrating 100 years and offers exhibits on a range of topics, such as the relationship between Jews and cannabis, it hosts concerts merging Latin Jazz and Klezmer and organizes popular Yiddish classes, alongside its research and archives.

“Bruce understood that he had to get YIVO out of its little nook,” Brent said. “His energy and imagination were an essential building block for helping to create what can be called the new YIVO as we see it today.”

Nadler’s work relationship with Slovin turned into a close friendship that lasted nearly four decades. He remembers going in for his initial interview and seeing “a bunch of old Jews, mostly from Poland, Lithuania, all chain-smoking, and they were all drinking black coffee. They reminded me of the survivors that I knew growing up in Montreal in the ‘60s. Then there was one guy at the end of the table, tall, very distinguished looking, wearing what was, clearly, an extremely expensive suit,” he recalled.

In the philanthropic world, Slovin was an anomaly, Nadler said. Though he was always a snazzy dresser, when Slovin opened his mouth, he sounded like a blue-collar worker.

Slovin invited Nadler to lunch after the interview. “I figured, ‘Okay, we’re probably gonna go to some nice steakhouse,” he said. Instead, Slovin took him to a Jewish diner. “That’s the kind of places he liked to eat, not fancy restaurants,” Nadler said. “He was so plainspoken, he reminded me of Warren Buffett… because Warren Buffett likes to go to McDonald’s on his way to work to grab some breakfast sandwiches, and that was Bruce.”

It was this approachability that made him such a spectacular fundraiser, Nadler said, comparing their journeys to raise funds from “little old ladies” to being similar to the characters Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in Mel Brook’s The Producers. 

Slovin was an older brother figure to Nadler and never delegated work. Together, they traveled through Europe looking to save collections of books and artifacts. Slovin always called Nadler “kiddo” and greeted him with a rub on the back.

Slovin has served many roles across the Jewish philanthropic world, including trustee of the Beth Israel Medical Center, the Park East Synagogue and Educational Alliance and member of the board of directors of the American Jewish Historical Society. 

But what he will likely be best remembered for is his idea of bringing numerous Jewish organizations — including YIVO, the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute and the Yeshiva University Museum — together into a single building on Manhattan’s West 16th Street under the banner of the Center for Jewish History in 2000.

“If we can bring all our collections together, you would really have an opportunity to study Jewish history in its full dimensions, the scholars, the lay people as well,” Slovin remembered saying in the Building New York interview.

Initially, many, including historian Jonathan Sarna, figured Slovin’s plans would falter. “At least half of the people I spoke with said to me that the center will never last because it was a vision that did not properly allow for the differences in the organizations that had become part of it,” Brent said about concern when he first took the executive director role in 2009. “Well, the center has lasted for 25 years, and YIVO has flourished.”

It was Slovin’s enthusiasm that united people, said Nadler. His passion helped him raise over $100 million. “He did it by sheer force of will and a conviction that all of these old pre-Holocaust, pre-State of Israel, divisions between Jews are not only irrelevant, they’re damaging… Everyone wrote him off as a dreamer. He just kept pushing, pushing, pushing.”

In 2011, Slovin stepped down as the center’s chairman. “When you find the opportunity to pass on your, I don’t want to call it legacy, but your work to good people to follow you, to continue that work, you take that opportunity,” he said.

Slovin’s impact is vast, according to Sarna, who quickly reconsidered his criticism of the Center after it became clear Slovin had the drive to make it work. “He appreciated the significance of history, and made a major impact on Jewish culture and life,” Sarna told eJP. “Everyone who benefits from the CJH, stands in his debt.”

“Bruce Slovin understood that memory is a form of survival,” Gavriel Rosenfeld, president of the Center for Jewish History, told eJP, “His work ensures that the stories of generations past will continue to inspire, guide, and strengthen Jewish life for generations yet to come.”

A father of three kids, Slovin never wanted his name on buildings or tributes, but agreed to allow it after his wife, Francesca Cernia Slovin, died in 2017. He wanted to honor her, and today, YIVO has an online museum in their name.

“I asked him once what he wants his legacy to be, and he looked at me like I was crazy,” Nadler said, “And he said, ‘What, you still believe in that afterlife bullshit?’ I said, ‘No, of course not.’ So he said, ‘So what do I care about my legacy? I’ll be dead.’”