Moses Phillips

Origins and early life

Moses Phillips was born in 1844 in Suwałki, in the Polish lands then ruled by the Russian Empire, and completed his rabbinical training there at about the age of fifteen.

Work and career

According to a family chronicle prepared at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1980, he had been the sexton of a synagogue in Suwałki and arrived in New York in 1881, exchanging the name Filipower for Phillips. The clothing company now called PVH traces its origins to 1881, when he and his wife Endel, with eight children to feed, began selling shirts sewn by hand from a pushcart to the anthracite coal miners of Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

In Pottsville he also served two terms of five years as rabbi of the Orthodox congregation on Eleventh Street, one of two founded there by Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. Back in New York, where he was naturalized in 1888, he ran his shirt business from 1 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, and he helped found the clinic on Henry Street from which Beth Israel Hospital grew. In 1907 his firm merged with the Pennsylvania shirtmaker founded by Dramin Jones to form Phillips-Jones, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1919.

His son Isaac, who led the company as president, struck the agreement with John Van Heusen to produce his soft, self-folding collar, and in 1957 the company took the name Phillips-Van Heusen. Now known as PVH and headquartered in Manhattan, the business that began with his pushcart owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands. A history of Pottsville's congregations published in 1934 credited his family with having done much for the Jewish people of the town, and his great-grandson Lawrence Phillips co-founded the American Jewish World Service in 1985.