Joseph Mandel, a philanthropist who donated tens of millions of dollars to Jewish schools, has died at 102.
The businessman passed away at his winter Palm Beach, Florida, home on March 22, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.
Along with his two brothers, Mandel co-founded the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation in 1953. Since then, the brothers donated millions to several schools and civic programs in their native Cleveland and around the world.
Their gifts to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland established the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, the Mandel Center for Non-Profit Management and the Alzheimer’s Care Institute. They also funded the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University in Boston.
Their $17 million gift last year to the Agnon School in Beachwood, Ohio — which was renamed the Joseph and Florence Mandel Jewish Day School — was one of the largest ever to a day school.
Mandel was born in Poland in 1913 and immigrated with his parents to Cleveland at the age of 7. In 1940, he and his brothers founded Premier Industrial Corp., an auto parts distributor they built off their uncle’s small store. It became a worldwide company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1964 and merged with United Kingdom-based Farnell Electronics in 1996. Premier Farnell took in almost $1.4 billion in revenue last year. — jta