By all accounts, Milwaukeean Louise Salinsky was a private, intelligent and independent person — but not necessarily one to spring surprises.
Yet when she died in November 2009 at the age of 87, surprises seemed to flower around her.
The first was her estate and her bequests. Even granting that she was the widow of an apparently successful physician, Lester V. Salinsky, it seems to have surprised people that she left approximately $12 million.
Her designated beneficiaries also seem to have been a surprise. According to Thomas McGinn, the lead attorney for the probate of Salinsky’s estate, after deducting expenses and a few individual bequests, Salinsky left the bulk of this estate to be divided among 16 non-profit organizations.
They included several local Jewish organizations: Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun (twice: once for unrestricted use, once for its Food for the Hungry program, according to the synagogue’s March bulletin); Congregation Shalom; Congregation Anshai Lebowitz (in memory of her husband); the Jewish Home and Care Center; the Jewish National Fund; and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Other beneficiary organizations include a synagogue in Chicago in memory of her parents; medical charities, like the American Heart Association and local hospitals; and the endowment fund of Northwestern University.
While the amounts each will receive are not yet determined — “We haven’t got our hands around all the assets and figures,” McGinn said in a telephone interview early in March — they have been estimated to be about $750,000 for each bequest.
"This is an incredibly generous and thoughtful gift,” Emanu-El’s president Robert Freibert wrote in the synagogue’s bulletin.
“The unrestricted portion of the gift will be used to provide the funds to cover our annual operating deficits, which total several hundred thousand dollars every year.
“[This gift] buys time for the congregation to eliminate the deficit in the capital campaign, attract new members, encourage additional annual giving, and replenish our endowment through direct contributions as well as planned giving…
As for the restricted gift to the Food for the Hungry program, he wrote, “This should become a long-term, signature program for CEEBJ. We will honor [Salinsky’s] memory by creating a permanent program to relieve hunger.”
McGinn, who was not the attorney who helped Salinsky draft her will, said he did not know why she selected these specific beneficiaries. But two rabbis who knew her suggested reasons for at least some of them.
In a telephone conversation, Rabbi Bernard Reichman said that Salinsky and her husband had been long-time members of his synagogue, the Orthodox Anshai Lebowitz, and she remained a member for some time after her husband died.
But she then decided to join Emanu-El and Shalom, both Reform synagogues. According to Rabbi Ronald Shapiro, senior rabbi of Shalom and the rabbi who officiated at her funeral, Salinsky had “a liberal Jewish background and was proud of the Reform movement.”
“Those things that she believed in were in harmony with Reform, like equal rights for women and social justice,” said Shapiro in a telephone interview. And, he added, “she had a strong sense of public duty.”
But there was another surprise in store for Shapiro. Salinsky, who had been a journalist before her marriage, often would speak to him about her family.
And she made some odd claims that he wondered about, he said – such as that she was distantly related to the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1634-77) and that her Sephardic ancestors played a role in the development of Jamaica.
After she died, Shapiro did some research — and his findings suggested that she might have been right.
A copy of part of her will was furnished to The Chronicle and gave her full name as Louise DeCasseres Mayer Salinsky. According to the death notice in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she was born and raised in Chicago and was the younger of two children of Benjamin DeCasseres Mayer and Jennie A Mintz Mayer.
DeCasseres apparently is a name that does go back to Jews of medieval Spain or Portugal. Shapiro found that Spinoza’s sister did marry a man named DeCasseres; that one of this sister’s brothers-in-law did go to Jamaica as an envoy for the British government; and later a branch of that family did leave Jamaica and settle in the U.S.
However, if this is the same family, this one branch of that family tree may now have ended. Louise and her husband had no children. Her brother, Nathaniel DeCasseres, preceded her in death; and her only survivors, according to the Journal Sentinel death notice, are two distant cousins.
Salinsky’s funeral took place on Nov. 30 graveside at Greenwood Cemetery.
Formerly op-ed editor, Leon Cohen has written for The Chronicle for more than 25 years.
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