Henrietta Milstein

Origins and early life

Henrietta Haas was born in Vienna in 1929, and in 1939, when she was nine, she and her parents left Austria to escape the Nazis and came to New York.

Work and career

Her son Stephen has called her a Holocaust survivor, from a family that had been very well off in Europe and had to leave everything behind. In 1949 she married Monroe Milstein, who worked in his father's wholesale coat business in Manhattan, and she went on to earn degrees in education and in library science. She worked as a teacher and school librarian on Long Island, and in 1972 it was her savings that paid most of the $75,000 down payment on a former clothing factory and outlet in Burlington, New Jersey, which she had urged her husband to buy.

The couple opened their first store in the building, and she came in at first only to keep an eye on things, then told her husband she did not want to be a watchman and would start selling children's clothes. That department, and later Baby Depot, turned Burlington Coat Factory from a coat outlet into a store for the whole family, and she served as its executive vice president for more than two decades. The family took the company public in 1983, when it had about thirty stores, and under the name Burlington Stores, adopted in 2009, it has grown to more than a thousand stores across the United States.

Outside the business she was president of B'nai B'rith Women, an organisation founded by American Jewish women around B'nai B'rith, was active in the Anti-Defamation League and the Long Beach parent-teacher association, and endowed a fellowship for medical research at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. She died of complications of cancer on 17 August 2001, at seventy-two, survived by her husband of fifty-two years, three sons and seven grandchildren.