Murray Pantirer and his wife, Louise, at a Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey event in the late 1990s.
Photo by Sharon Faulkner
November 13, 2008
Beyond caring for the well-being of his family, Murray Pantirer had two major goals: to honor the memory of the Jewish community from which he came, almost all of whose members perished in the Holocaust, and to keep alive the name of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved him and his closest friend — along with some 1,000 others — in perhaps the best-known act of rescue in the Nazi era.
When Pantirer died on Nov. 7 at the age of 83, family members and a wide circle of admirers were able to say he had accomplished both goals. A builder and longtime resident of Hillside who recently moved to Livingston, Pantirer, besides being one of Schindler’s most vocal advocates, was a philanthropist who turned his giving into a living memorial for the victims of the Shoa.
He was a former president of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, a former chair of its annual campaign, and a founding member of its Builders Campaign Division.
Pantirer was a major contributor to other Jewish causes, including Israel Bonds, and served as a sponsor of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Manhattan.
“We are the ambassadors for those who perished,” Pantirer said in a New York Times profile in 1997.
He was born Mejzesz Puntierer in 1925 in Cracow, Poland. In 1942, when he was 17, the Nazis deported him and a brother to Plaszow as forced laborers. Two years later, his brother was sent to Auschwitz. Murray — for no reason he could ever identify — was sent to work in a Brunnlitz factory operated by Schindler, a German industrialist who sheltered Jewish workers in his employ. More than 1,000 Jews would survive the Holocaust thanks to his efforts.
Pantirer was liberated in 1945, the only one of the nine members of his family to survive. He came to the United States in 1949.
Abe Zuckerman was Pantirer’s childhood playmate in Cracow and was also saved by Schindler. After the war, they and a third “Schindler Jew,” Izak Levenstein, joined forces in New Jersey and founded what became Bertram Associates. First, they erected low-cost housing and then gradually went on to build more and more luxurious homes.
In development after development that they built, they named at least one street for Oskar Schindler —more than 24 in all, including Schindler Drive in South Plainfield and Schindler Way in Livingston.
Some residents complained about the street name, but after Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie Schindler’s List came out in 1994, the builders faced no more objections. The men also provided the aging Schindler with financial help until his death in 1974, and endowed a scholarship in his name at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Schindler attended a 1972 party in Short Hills for Pantirer’s 25th wedding anniversary.
Fellow survivors Sol and Clara Kramer, who live in Elizabeth, shared Pantirer’s commitment to the local Jewish community and to Israel. Clara and Murray worked together establishing the Holocaust Resource Foundation at Kean University in Union in 1982. “He was the first president, and then I took over,” she said.
He had begun to scale back his activities by the time Stanley Stone, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, joined the organization in the early 1990s but he was still struck by Pantirer’s presence. “I was taken by the sense of dignity,” Stone said. “He was very soft spoken and calm, and very dignified.”
Murray Pantirer is survived by his wife, Louise; his son, Larry; his daughters, Betty Schwartz and Elisa Pines, and his nine grandchildren.
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