Henry Taub

Origins and early life

Henry Taub was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 20 September 1927, the son of a junk dealer who had come from Poland in the early 1920s, and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of the city. He skipped two grades, took an accounting degree at New York University in three years, finishing at the age of nineteen.

Work and career

When a clothing client failed to pay its workers one week because the clerk in charge fell ill, and the employees walked out, he saw the need for a firm that would prepare payrolls for others. In 1949 he started Automatic Payrolls in an office above an ice cream parlour in Paterson, soon joined by his brother Joseph and then by their childhood friend Frank Lautenberg, the future senator, as salesman. In Lautenberg's words, Henry was the strategist who designed the system, Joe ran the operation and he sold it; the company became Automatic Data Processing in 1958 and went public in 1961.

He was its president from 1949 to 1970 and then its chairman, and when he retired in the mid-1980s the company was processing the paychecks of a tenth of the nation's workforce. He was a passionate supporter of Israel and of Jewish causes, president and chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1981 to 1986, and his son remembered him saying that nothing could be more Jewish than to help relieve the suffering of others.

He was president of the American Technion Society from 1974 to 1976 and later chaired the Technion's international board of governors, and the Taub building in Haifa houses its Faculty of Computer Science, which he supported from its first days. With his wife, Marilyn, he funded the Taub Institute for research on Alzheimer's disease at Columbia University and the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. He died of complications of leukaemia at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on 31 March 2011, at the age of eighty-three.