Himmelstein, Lena

(Lane Bryant Malsin)

(1881–1951)

   US dress merchant. The daughter of an immigrant family from Lithuania, Lena pioneered the design and sale of special dresses first for pregnant women and then for outsize women generally. Starting with a small shop in New York, she built up the Lane Bryant chain all over the United States, with a turnover in 1969 of $200, 000,000. She and her family actively supported programmes of prenatal care. HIRSCH, Baron Maurice de 1831–96. German banker and philanthropist. The two great Jewish benefactors of the late 19th century were both titled bankers residing in Paris - Baron Edmond de ROTHSCHILD and Baron Maurice de Hirsch.

   Hirsch was born into a wealthy and aristocratic banking family in Bavaria, and settled in Paris. His huge fortune derived from mining and industrial ventures, but mainly from railway construction in Russia, Hungary and Turkey. He devoted himself almost entirely to large-scale philanthropy after the tragic death of his only son Lucien in 1887. In 1891 he established the Jewish Colonization Organization (ICA) as a company registered in London, with its main office in Paris and himself as president. He endowed it with an initial capital of two million pounds, later increased to ten million pounds - a staggering sum in those days. Its central objective was to provide for the emigration and land settlement of Russian Jews in the New World. With the consent of the czar’s government, committees were set up throughout Russia, and a number of vocational and farm schools developed for training the emigrants. The main area of resettle-ment was in Argentina. The colonization reached its peak in that country about 1930, when half a million hectares were being cultivated by twenty thousand Jewish settlers. But as time passed, there was a steady drift to the cities by the younger generation, and the Jewish farm population dwindled to a few thousand, all of whom owned their own land.

   From 1899 to 1923, IC A administered the Rothschild colonies in Palestine, at Baron Edmond’s request and with his financial aid. After that, ICA continued to give assistance to a number of settlements and educational institutions in Palestine and later in Israel. In 1895, after HERZL had written Der Judenstaat, it was natural for him to turn to Baron de Hirsch for support. He wrote to ask for an interview, which was granted. The meeting produced no practical results. Herzl dismissed the baron’s colonization efforts as mere philanthropy, ‘creating beggars’; while the baron regarded Herzl’s ideas of a sovereign Jewish state as sheer fantasy.