Portrait of Robert Kaufman, courtesy of his estate.

Robert “Bob” Kaufman, a giant in the world of New York philanthropy, was a fixture at The New York Community Trust since 1987, first as a distribution committee member and vice chair, and later a consulting member of the board.

“Bob was the consummate New Yorker,” said Jamie Drake, chair of The Trust’s Distribution Committee. “His family’s immigration story, driven by the Holocaust, left an indelible impression on him and the way he served our great city.”

Known for his love of gardening, the arts, and law, he was a modern-day Renaissance man. His interests were outnumbered only by the causes he cared about. Bob was dedicated to improving our judicial system, our military, our political process, our health care institutions, and our neighborhoods.

As a distinguished lawyer and partner at Proskauer Rose and a member of numerous nonprofit boards and government advisory committees, Bob “certainly left his mark,” Drake said. Many considered him a leading authority on nonprofit governance, and Drake praised his attention to detail, wise counsel, and heartfelt passion for The Trust’s work.

Robert Max Kaufman was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, to Bertha (nee Hirsch) and Paul Kaufman, who ran the Vienna office of Berrick Brothers, an English company that produced Matchbox toys.  On the night of November 9, 1938, widely known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, Paul Kaufman and thousands of other Jewish men were arrested and sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp established by the Nazi government. Meanwhile, Paul’s brother Felix Kaufmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Vienna, had been planning to emigrate to America and had convinced other family members to apply for the necessary documents to leave Austria, too.

Because of his uncle’s early realization of the threat to Jews, Bob’s paperwork was in order, and he was on the first trainload of children sent to England on Kindertransport in December 1938.  There, he was cared for by English families until he could be reunited with his own. Miraculously, his father was released from Dachau in 1939 because he, too, had all the necessary immigration documents. On December 17, 1939, the entire family, including his older sister, Susan, boarded a ship for America and docked in New Jersey on December 30.

As Bob explains in his memoir, Paying Back, a Refugee Kid’s Thank You to America, the year he spent in England and the people who helped his family “probably had the biggest influence on my feelings about life.” He remembers the stranger who provided an affidavit for his family to leave Vienna, the uncle who pressured his father to get a visa in 1938, the families he stayed with during the holidays, the professors who set up the Cambridge Refugee Society. Because of people like them, Bob’s family and thousands of other Jewish refugees with no safe havens were rescued from the Holocaust.

Bob cites a letter from his mother dated September 5, 1939, three days after the war started:

You must never forget, all of your life long, that only by the help of England and of English kind men and women, are we here, saved, and out of the country where they will fight very soon … We must help everywhere and show our gratitude to England whenever we have an opportunity to help. You must be very good and grateful …. And when you meet evacuated children, you will be very kind to them.

“You can imagine my feeling reading that more than seventy years later!” Bob said in his memoir.

Bob graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and enrolled at Brooklyn College, but “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said.  After the first year, he learned he could be drafted for 21 months or enlist for 12.  It was peacetime, so he enlisted and spent a year in the Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He learned afterward that one year of active duty required four years in the reserves. Then the Korean War broke out in July 1950, and he was within days of being called up for active duty when he dodged another bullet: The new secretary of Defense, George Marshall, changed the rules, and those who had already served in the Army didn’t have to report. Bob went back to school.

During his last couple of years at Brooklyn College, he decided to get serious. He graduated in economics with honors and took a job as junior economist at the State Division of Housing while studying for a master’s degree at New York University.

In 1955, he enrolled at Brooklyn Law School. The only requirement was a college degree. No application, no exam. “In those days, law schools were seeking students because they needed the income,” he recalled. “It was the greatest lucking-out I ever had. I fell in love with it.”

He graduated at the top of his class and was hired as a junior lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in Washington, D.C., but soon “was bored to death.” He eagerly accepted an offer from New York’s new junior senator, Jacob Javits, to be his legislative assistant.

In 1959, he and Javits’ press secretary, Sheila Kelley, were quietly married. “We didn’t tell anyone we were married because we would never have been able to get out of the office and go home,” he said. “And … neither of us would ever have gotten another raise because together we made more than the senator.”

Bob speculates in his book that many things happened in his life because of his involvement in bar associations and many things in bar associations happened because of his other activities—the Boy Scouts, the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, competing in the National Moot Court Competition for Brooklyn College … “It’s all intertwined,” he said. The people he met and the connections he made shaped his life and career.

When he learned Javits wasn’t going to seek re-election in 1961, Bob decided to return to New York and look for a job at a law firm. Word got around, and another senator’s assistant asked if he could send Bob’s resume to George Shapiro, a partner at Proskauer Rose, a prestigious Manhattan firm. Bob responded that he’d already tried a year earlier and gotten the standard “We have your resume on file” rejection letter. “That’s not how it works,” his friend said.  “Don’t worry, let me see if I can set up an appointment for you…”

“I came up and met with George Shapiro and we hit it off,” Bob recalled. A few months later he got a call from another Proskauer Rose partner: “…if we made you an offer, would you accept?” the partner asked. “Yes, sir, I certainly would,” Bob responded.

Before leaving Washington, Sheila and Bob finally told Javits and their families they were married. Javits was pleased; Sheila’s mother said she already knew because Sheila had yelled at him when he stepped in a bog with goo up to his knees—something only a spouse would do.

They both loved skiing and took many trips to Vermont, where they bought property and built a house. They started spending weekends in Wilmington, a picturesque town in the Green Mountains, skiing during the winter months and gardening and golfing the rest of the year. After his parents gave them a crabapple tree for the front yard, Sheila started making crabapple jelly. By the early 2000s, they had five crabapple trees on their property, and were making about 750 jars of jams and jelly for friends, neighbors, co-workers, and associates. Every December, Bob either hand-delivered or shipped the jelly all over the world.

He said his neighbors introduced him to the taste of fresh salad vegetables, and he planted a plot 40 feet by 40 feet in his backyard. One summer, he counted 241 vegetable varieties in his garden, including 43 kinds of tomatoes and 26 types of potatoes. He and Sheila started entering produce and flowers in the Deerfield Valley Farmers Fair. One year they had 81 entries and took home 80 prizes, plus he won “Gardener of the Year” six times—two of those awards he shared with other “green thumbs.”

Back in New York, Bob had a long and productive association with the County Lawyers Association, where he was chairman of the Civil Rights Committee; the New York City Bar Association, where he was president from 1986 to 1988; and The New York Community Trust, where he served on the board from 1987 to 2010—the last 10 years as vice chair—then as vice chair emeritus. “I went to my first meeting and fell in love with it,” he said in Giving Back. “It was the most wonderful thing, the things we did, the programs, and the staff was just terrific.”

Bob also shared his legal acumen, wit, and wisdom with countless other boards, committees, and organizations, including the Board of Visitors to West Point, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (a position he called “my absolute favorite military experience”), the board of directors of the National Organization of Women (NOW) Legal Defense Fund, as a committee chair of the National Association of Women Judges, and a member the board of directors and many committees of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.

A “wonderful home health aide” from a division of Visiting Nurse Service had helped care for his wife, Sheila, after she started to lose her memory, he said in his book. Sheila died in 2009 of Alzheimer’s.

Among his proudest achievements, Bob said, was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 against the nomination of “very conservative, very backward” Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme Court. As president of the City Bar Association, Bob testified, “You have to take 30 years of statements of philosophy very seriously. The next case has new facts, and there’s no reason to believe . . . that when Judge Bork sees new facts in a new case, that he won’t apply his principles.” The committee, led by then Senator Joseph Biden, opposed Bork’s nomination, which was then defeated in the full Senate. Anthony Kennedy was later nominated for the court seat and approved.

After Sheila died, Bob created a fund at The Trust in her name to support those living without homes. He also has two other funds at The Trust to help meet the city’s most critical needs.

Looking back on his life’s work in a 2013 Brooklyn Law Notes profile, Bob said: “Everything I have done has been about paying back. I was a refugee who came to this country, and I was given tremendous opportunity. I have to give back, and I have had a great time doing it.”

Robert Max Kaufman died April 8, 2024.  He was 94.

“He will be greatly missed by our board and staff, who came to know him as a superb governor and a generous colleague,” The Trust’s Jamie Drake wrote in his tribute.