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Alvin Slater (CAS’40) and his wife, Shirley, at their home in Boston last year Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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As a young man living in the U.S. during the 1930s and ’40s, Alvin Slater (CAS’40) was deeply touched by the Holocaust. “We grew up during that period, my husband and I,” his wife, Shirley, recalls. “We knew how desperate things were, and he wanted it to be remembered that this had happened, so that, hopefully, we’d learn from the experience and it would not happen again to anybody. He felt that we each have a responsibility that this not be forgotten.”
In recognition of this responsibility, the Slaters have given nearly $2 million to fund the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Professorship, a chair in Jewish Holocaust Studies at Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. Alvin Slater, who died of a stroke on February 2, 2006, at the age of 86, intended that the professorship “serve as a continuous reminder of the Jewish Holocaust,” as he wrote in a letter to the University.
“For the last thirty years, Holocaust studies has been closely identified with Boston University,” said Professor Steven Katz, director of the Wiesel Center. “Among the people who teach Holocaust Studies here — [Professor of Sociology and Religion] Hillel Levine, [Associate Professor and Convener of Italian] Nancy Harrowitz, myself, and others — we have a strength and expertise that we hope to deepen with this new gift. We also hope to continue to build the program. We have a large undergraduate enrollment in several courses in Holocaust studies and several graduate students, and we’re looking to expand the graduate program.”
Slater remembered his BU years fondly, family members say. “He felt that BU was very good to him,” Shirley Slater says. “He went on to law school and he had a good life. Besides being financially successful, he was a successful person, and he felt he owed BU something for giving him the opportunity.”
Unable to join the Navy because of a vision problem, Slater began his career working as an economist in Washington, D.C. In addition to his full-time work, he took on two part-time jobs — as a shoe salesman and a theater usher. “He lived on these two part-time jobs and banked his entire full-time salary,” his son Ken recalls. “He was saving. He was trying to build something.”
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1946, Slater became an attorney, all the while continuing to save money to invest in real estate and various markets. Eventually his success in those endeavors led him to leave his law practice to focus full-time on his investments.
Investing was, in fact, his first career. “He always had an interest in stocks, since he was twelve or thirteen years old,” Ken Slater says. “He was too young to open a stock account, so his parents opened an account for him, and he would buy and sell stocks — at thirteen years old. And he kept up with it his whole life, literally; the morning of the day he had his stroke he was on the phone with me buying Chinese and Russian stocks.”
Throughout his life he traveled widely, usually by ship, and often brought his wife and his sons, Ken and Richard (CAS’71), along with him on trips to Europe and Asia. “In 1961, he took us to Russia — we had family there,” Ken Slater recalls. “It was more dicey then, as the U.S. wasn’t on particularly good terms with the Soviets. We’d come from Japan, I believe, and he bought empty suitcases and filled them with Jewish prayer books and things like razor blades, things that they needed for practical living — and he smuggled them in.”
He was known to be extraordinarily modest about his accomplishments, professing only a sense of responsibility for the well-being of his family and for others. “It has been more than sixty years since I attended Boston University,” Alvin Slater told Bostonia last year. “In the years since graduating I have become a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a real estate developer, and I hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. My experiences have taught me many important lessons about life. Personal integrity is the most important trait one can cultivate, and I look for this in all my personal and business dealings.”
He is remembered fondly by many in the University community. “Alvin Slater’s death put an end to a life of a great man and a very good man,” BU President Emeritus John Silber wrote in an e-mail interview with Advancement. “I feel privileged to have known him. And Boston University has been privileged to have him not only as an honor student, but as an honored alumnus and a major supporter of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.” — Tricia Brick
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