The man named Louis Bamberger has been a source of interest and fascination to Linda Forgosh ever since her mother took her to Bamberger's department store in Newark when she was 12 years old and permitted her to pick out the dress she wanted to wear when she became a bat mitzva.

Now, a $7,920 grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission will finance that fascination. Forgosh, curator and research director at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, has been commissioned to write a biography of one of New Jersey's preeminent retailers and philanthropists.

From a time before bridges and tunnels carried shoppers across the Hudson to an era after superhighways could transport them to myriad shopping malls, L. Bamberger and Company stood as the state's flagship department store.

Bamberger was the man at its helm. He created "Bamberger's" from the remnants of Hill and Craig, a retail store on Newark's Market Street that went bankrupt, and poured much of its voluminous profits into philanthropic and educational institutions within and outside the Jewish community.

"To the Jewish community, he was a thinker, a doer, a very quiet, behind-the-scenes, shy lifetime bachelor," said Forgosh.

And although he was not a religious man, Bamberger, who was born in 1855, gave generously to the Hebrew Orphans Asylum, to Newark Beth Israel Hospital, and to the Conference of Jewish Charities, a precursor of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

"He was one of the German Jews in Newark who realized that all of the agencies that sprung up around the city and had a Jewish interest were competing for the same dollars," Forgosh said. "It was something that was happening all over the country. So Chicago set up its Jewish federation" to pool and allocate its community's financial resources, and a year later, in 1923, partly under Bamberger's leadership, Newark's Jewish community followed suit.

On a nonsectarian level, he donated the land and building for the Newark Museum and financed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Bamberger was responsible for its hiring of Albert Einstein in 1933. He "made sure that Einstein had an appropriate salary," said Forgosh.

Bamberger was remarkably modest, she said.

"He didn't like the spotlight, and he preferred to donate anonymously," said Forgosh. "He never held anything but an honorary title." He greeted being "feted and honored" for his charitable contributions "with a lot of discomfort," she said. "But he understood that he led by example, and on certain occasions he would permit his name to be used. For any organization to have Bamberger's name on his letterhead was like money in the bank."

From the time he moved into Hill and Craig in 1892 until long after he sold his store to R.H. Macy's in 1929, Bamberger remained a hands-on executive who walked the store's aisles and made it an interesting place to shop.

"If you were a philatelist, there was a stamp department. If you were a photographer, there was a camera department. You could get your glasses there. You could buy your medicines," said Forgosh.

Bamberger's was the first site of WOR, the first radio station ever to broadcast from a department store. "Why did it happen? Because Bamberger loved technology. Everything happened there," she said.

When Bamberger died in 1944, more than 1,000 of Newark's business and civic leaders attended a second service for him at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun. The Bamberger's name lived on in suburban malls in the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. The Newark store changed its name to Macy's in 1986, then finally closed its doors in 1992.

Eulogies and printed obituaries will all be part of a display Forgosh plans to mount in 2009 at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany after the book is published.

"Bamberger reflects an era in Newark that is just special," said Forgosh. "To tell his life story is to capture Newark in the greatest sense of what it was and hopefully will return to — a meeting point for people, a place where movies were made and great symphonies were played and personalities evolved."

Anyone with Bamberger information or memorabilia is asked to contact the historian or call 973-929-2994.

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