Almost seven decades later, the Jewish philanthropist has held that lesson close. The former chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Northern California, AIPAC, Morris has been appointed by President Bush to the governing body of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Morris, a Republican who lives on the Peninsula, is one of 11 new appointees who will be sworn in on June 4. He is the only new council member from Northern California.
“This is something I really feel in my soul,” Morris said of the museum’s mission. He praised the “tremendous job” it performs in educating more than 17 million people who have visited the institution since it opened in 1993 and the millions more who glean information from its Web site.
“The whole operation of the museum is of great interest to me,” said Morris, in a telephone interview from his office in Menlo Park. “I think the whole world should know what happened in hopes it will never happen again.”
An early financial backer of the memorial, Morris said he and his wife, Roslyn, visited the museum about six years ago. “We were both so enthralled with it, we got separated from each other and we finally had to meet back in the hotel. It just captivated us completely.”
Particularly moving to Morris was the identity card he received as he entered, which bore the name and other information about one particular victim of the Holocaust.
Though Morris isn’t yet versed on his full duties with the council, he is no stranger to governing bodies of both big corporations and charitable organizations.
Until 1979, he headed the Mervyn’s company he founded 30 years earlier with a 2,800-square-foot department store in San Lorenzo. He served on the board when Mervyn’s merged with the Dayton Hudson Corporation, now Target. He is a former board member of the Jewish Home for the Aged and Mount Zion hospital and remains a national trustee for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
“I feel that I have a Jewish heart,” says Morris, whose parents ran the tiny Morris Department Store in Delano, a grape- and cotton-growing community that had a population of about 2,500.
Though his parents weren’t religious, “they kept instilling in me that I was Jewish and I should be proud of being Jewish.”
Growing up, Morris worked in his parents’ business, where the family routinely was subjected to casually delivered remarks about “the Jew store.”
“I wasn’t abused or anything,” he recalls. “There’s always remarks.”
After graduating from high school, Morris briefly attended U.C. Berkeley, but was called back home before finishing finals in 1939, when his father suffered a heart attack.
After a stint in the Army during World War II, Morris moved to San Francisco in 1949 and launched a career as a traveling salesman. Later, that year, he and two employees opened what he described as “a little junior department store” in San Lorenzo that later grew to become an empire of 75 Mervyn’s stores spread throughout the West. “Today, it’s over a $4 billion company,” says Morris, who no longer is affiliated with the operation.
Retail runs in the Morris family. His great-grandparents owned a store during the Gold Rush in the California foothills town of Columbia. The building, he says, is still standing.
Morris now heads the Morris Management Company, a family investment firm.
Of his appointment to the Holocaust museum council, he said, “Being involved in a department store, that’s nothing you can feel in your soul. I’m quite emotional about the museum. What a purpose it serves.”