Five hundred mourners attended Orthodox funeral services at Congregation Ahavath Israel this afternoon for Jennie Grossinger, who died yesterday at the age of 80 at her resort hotel in nearby Grossinger of a cerebral vascular stroke. Mrs. Grossinger rose from a garment-shop worker on New York’s Lower East Side to become a hostess to some of the world’s leading figures. She contributed considerable sums of money to Israel and to domestic Jewish causes.
Mrs. Grossinger, famed philanthropist, gave vast sums to projects including the Jennie Grossinger Recreational and Convalescent Home in Safed, Israel; the Jennie Grossinger Medical Center in Tel Aviv; the National Council to Combat Blindness: the National Foundation for Muscular Dystrophy; the United Jewish Appeal; the Leo Levi arthritis hospital in Hot Springs, Ark., and the Deborah tuberculosis hospital in Browns Mills, N.J.
She was associated with such organizations as Hadassah, Mizrachi, the Zionist Organization of America and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies; was a fellow of Brandeis University (although she had only four years’ formal education), and received two honorary doctorates and nearly 300 other awards.
Mrs. Grossinger was born in Bialagrad, Austria-Hungary, and came to the United States in 1900 at the age of 8. In her teem she worked sewing buttonholes and attended public and Hebrew schools. Aided by her husband, Harry, who died in 1964, Mrs. Grossinger combined warmth, generosity, a remarkable memory and a sharp business sense to create and sustain her Catskills resort, a 1300-acre vacation empire-with-a-heart that began in 1914 as a 100-acre farm bought for $450.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
