Tad Taube was born in 1931 in Poland, and had the good fortune to leave the country on the eve of the Holocaust in 1939. Today, over 70 years, later he feels like he's symbolically returning to the country of his birth. He considers his philanthropic involvement in the Polin Museum, an unprecedented public-private partnership that will open on Oct. 28, 2014, a contribution to the culture of his forefathers. The Tad Taube Family Foundation and the Koret Foundation which Tad Taube presides were able to secure around $19 million in support for the Museum. Who is the man behind this effort?
Find out more about the Polin Museum: here
From Toruń to Upper State New York
Tad Taube was born in Kraków in 1931, but at the time his family was living in Toruń, a big - majorly German - town which after WWI found itself within the borders of the newly established Poland.
‘My mother's family had a long history of living in Kraków, and it was customary when I was born for the woman who was going to have a child to go to the house of her mother and have the child there. So that's why I was born in Kraków.’
A couple weeks after birth, his mother moved back to Toruń, where they lived until he was about six. Here his father had a business and factories. The family spoke German as did most of the citizens of the city:
‘Toruń when I lived there was 100 percent German-speaking. Everyone spoke German. You couldn't survive if you didn't speak German.’
When his father's business grew, and it became important that there be a central office in Warsaw, the family moved. That would have been around 1937. Tad Taube went to school ('I think it was a French private school', he remembers) and only then did he begin to learn Polish.
The family lived in Warsaw in an apartment house that was completely destroyed during WW2. Taube remembers that the square was called Plac Napoleona [today: Plac Powstańców Warszawy].
‘It was on the same street as the Prudential building. So when people ask me what do I remember from Warszawa, I say Prudential, because I used to walk down there with my nanny and look at this enormous building. It was the highest building in Poland at that time.’
In May or June 1939 his mother and father went on a business trip in the US.
‘They were living in NYC and made the decision not to come back to Poland. I was staying with my grandmother in Warsaw, but when my father's best friend went to the US, I went with him.’
The 8-year-old got to New York (or Ellis Island, to be more precise) via Paris and Cherbourg.
‘I went to live with my mother and father in NYC, but the first thing they did - and that was very smart - was to send me to a summer camp in Upper New York State. I was in a summer camp with 100 boys, nobody spoke German, nobody spoke Polish. So it was a 100 percent immersion - within seven or eight weeks I could speak English fluently’, he remembers.
In retrospect he considers it a very good experience: ‘ I went immediately into school. No one had even the faintest idea that I was a refugee... My English was so good.’
War and propaganda movies
When Hitler invaded Poland his parents lost many assets which they had in Poland. Very soon the family couldn't afford to live in New York and they moved to LA.
‘My parents had some friends in the film industry. At that point the US were making mostly propaganda war movies. One of the things that were in great demand were kids that could speak Polish or Russian. So I was offered a part in one of those films .’
He played a part in a short film called Greenie and one entitled Tomorrow the world - about a Nazi youngster that moved into a residential area of Long Island, and tried to organize everybody in a kind of Hitler Jugend. ‘I was a little Polish kid that this German kid beat up,’ he recalls.
He played a few other parts - usually roles of boys from Eastern Europe - before his father and mother declared it was enough. He was henceforth able to focus on school. Looking back, he sees the experience as ‘a pretty good film career’.
Tikkun Olam
When asked about the beginnings of his philanthropic activity, Tad Taube points to his early childhood. ‘Growing up in the US, one is giving money to the boy-scouts and girl-scouts, community chests, etc. Philanthropy is part of the culture.’
‘But from my standpoint there's a big difference between philanthropic activity which is part of the culture and having essentially a business model which is what I have and have had for a number of years’, he adds.
For Taube, who was a successful real-estate entrepreneur and corporate executive (‘I've been fortunate to be a pretty good investor, I mean there's got to be some reason how I was able to be a major donor to the Polin Museum,’ he says), this formal philanthropic involvement dates back to over 45 years ago.
‘I made my first serious gift of philanthropic nature in the early 70s. I'm a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford has a very elaborate outreach for people who went to that school. This means that wherever you are they're going to find you. And they found me and that's how it started.’
When asked if he thinks the tradition of Jewish charity culture shaped his activity in any way he answers:
‘I think Jewish people have more cultural commitment to philanthropy and to helping other people and that they have some religious orientation to make the world a better place. It's not something that I'm really focused on because your idea how to make the world a better place and my idea may be very different. But you might still have a very legitimate reason for whatever it is that you're supporting.’
He adds that this ties back to the Hebrew tikkun olam, which means 'repairing the world'.
‘But repairing the world is very broad, generalized - and philanthropy is actually specific amounts of money for specific purposes.’