Stanley Feldberg

Origins and early life

Stanley Harris Feldberg was born on 19 July 1924, the son of Max Feldberg, who with his brother Morris had fled Russia in the early 1900s to escape conscription into the czar's army and had settled in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Work and career

The brothers started a small hosiery business there in 1919 and opened their Bell Hosiery Shops in 1929, and the Army Air Forces took Stanley away from his studies at Dartmouth College between 1942 and 1946. He graduated with the Dartmouth class of 1946 and joined the family company in 1949, straight from college, after working summers in its stores since high school. In 1956, when he and his cousin Sumner Feldberg, the sons of the two founders, started the Zayre Corporation to run discount department stores, he became its president, and the chain opened with two self-service stores in Hyannis and in Boston.

The name came from the Yiddish words zehr gut, very good, and by 1968 Zayre had 115 stores across the eastern half of the United States, having gone public in 1962. He led Zayre as president until 1978 and then chaired its executive board; when the company reorganized in 1989 under the name of its off-price arm, the TJX Companies, he was its vice chairman, and he retired in 1996 as a director of TJX and of BJ's Wholesale Club.

In Wellesley, where he lived for many years, he was president and a director of Temple Beth Elohim, the town's Reform synagogue, and he chaired the Golden Anniversary Fund of Beth Israel Hospital in Brookline. He and his wife, Theodora Lehrer Feldberg, supported the founding of the Feldberg Library at Dartmouth, which opened in June 1973 to serve the college's business and engineering schools.

Later years

He later moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, died in Charleston on 24 April 2004, at seventy-nine, and is buried in the Beth Yam cemetery on Hilton Head Island, listed by the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina.