Sumner Feldberg

Origins and early life

Sumner Feldberg, called Sonny, was born on 19 June 1924 and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Morris Feldberg, who with his brother Max had fled Russia and built a chain of women's apparel shops in New England.

Work and career

The Harvard Business School remembers him as the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and he sat for years on the board of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, in Boston. In his first year at Harvard he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, trained as a meteorologist and, as a lieutenant in Natal, Brazil, gave weather reports to pilots flying on to Africa, India and China. He came back to graduate from Harvard in 1947, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and joined the first postwar class of the Harvard Business School, the class of 1949.

At the family's Bell Shops he saw downtown stores losing shoppers to the suburbs, and rather than copy the discounters who sold out of empty textile mills, he bet on new stores built for self-service. That idea became the Zayre chain, which opened two stores in Massachusetts in 1956, took its name from the family's Yiddish expression zehr gut, very good, and went public in 1962. He went on to help establish the TJ Maxx off-price stores and BJ's Wholesale Club, and after Zayre Corporation took the name of the TJX Companies in 1989 he chaired it until he retired in 1995.

He spent ten years on the board of the National Retail Merchants Association and five more as its president, and sat on the boards of Brandeis University, Boston University's medical school and the Harvard School of Public Health. With his wife, Esther, he travelled every year in support of Israel and of Jewish communities around the world, and in 2021 the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach showed the collection the couple had assembled.

He died on 1 July 2022, at ninety-eight, and his family asked that gifts in his memory go to Facing History and Ourselves.