George’s Story

A Russian Orphan Becomes America’s “Penny Philanthropist”

Born in 1899 in Nikolayev, Russia, George Ginsberg and his older sisters lost both their parents by the time the boy was 5 years old. At age 10, in order to keep him from being conscripted into the Russian army, his uncle Leon Nemirovksy sent George to live in America. He passed through Ellis Island and found a home with another uncle, Henry, who owned a photography store in Bay Shore, Long Island.

That act of charity on the part of George’s uncles would lead to many more as the young orphan grew to be a man, with a family of his own.

Following in his Uncle Henry’s footsteps, George took to photography, opened his own shop in Philadelphia, and later moved to Newark to take over his uncle’s business. He loved philanthropy as much as photography and supported a number of causes. After selling his shop to a partner in 1966, he made giving his full-time pursuit. The donations were small, but numerous, and they kept flowing to the charities he believed in.

George Ginsberg, "the penny philanthropist"

“A typical donation was $1 or $2, rarely more than $10,” The New York Times wrote when George passed away at the age of 97.

“Mr. Ginsberg doled out his money carefully, choosing benefactors as though he were a Rockefeller. In fact, Mr. Ginsberg often said he had taken a cue from John D. Rockefeller’s custom of passing out dimes to street children.” — The New York Times, Nov. 22, 1996

He kept files on groups that asked him for donations and spent a fair amount of his day opening the avalanche of requests that arrived at his home, the paper described. George used a plain white envelope with “The Penny Philanthropy Fund” printed on the front to gather donations from friends and family and would urge others to feed the “kitty,” as he called it.

He would usually tell his recipients not to waste the postage necessary to send him a thank you note, but he loved it when they printed his letters asking others to do their part. If every reader would just give $1, George wrote in a typical missive to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, the charity’s $5 million goal would be easy to reach. “Don’t be ashamed to send it,” he wrote. “Those dollars add up.”

Henry Dodd, the newest addition to George's family

George and his wife Fannie had two daughters, three grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren, who all called him “Poppa George.” (Recently, his first great-great-grandson was born — and named Henry.) But while George’s family in America grew, he had trouble keeping track of his relatives back in the old country, even falling out of touch with his own sisters for a period during the Bolshevik Revolution and Second World War.

Eventually, George traveled to Russia to reunite with them, but he always wondered what became of his Uncle Leon’s family, who fled to France a decade after George emigrated to America. His sisters had heard nothing of them for years. George had read a newspaper review of one of Irene Nemirovsky’s books in the 1930s, she he knew that she had become an author, but that was the last that anyone in the Ginsberg family ever heard of their relatives in France. George passed away never knowing what became of his cousin or her daughters.

One day, though, George’s children would learn and get the opportunity that he never had to reunite with their long-lost cousins in France and America.