Billie Tisch obit

Billie Tisch, Matriarch of Billionaire Loews Family, Dies at 98

Wilma “Billie” Tisch, a matriarch of one of America’s wealthiest families and leader of its philanthropy to Jewish causes and to New York City cultural and medical institutions, has died. She was 98. 

She was not on the list.

(Bloomberg) — Wilma “Billie” Tisch, a matriarch of one of America’s wealthiest families and leader of its philanthropy to Jewish causes and to New York City cultural and medical institutions, has died. She was 98.

She died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan, the New York Times reported, citing her son, Thomas Tisch.

The wife of a co-founder of Loews Corp., Tisch rose to leadership positions with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York including a term as the group’s first elected female president. The federation, known today as the UJA-Federation of New York, raised more than $234 million in 2023, according to the group’s annual report. Tisch had remained an honorary member of its board.

The 2003 death of her husband, Laurence Tisch, followed by the 2005 death of his brother and business partner, Preston Robert Tisch, left Wilma and her sister-in-law, Joan Tisch, to oversee the multibillion-dollar fortune the brothers had built. Joan died in 2017.

Forbes magazine estimated the family’s net worth to be $10.1 billion as of February 2024.

The Tisch brothers had turned Loews, a theater chain when they bought it in 1959, into a conglomerate by investing in hotels, energy companies and insurer CNA Financial Corp. Its principal units include CNA Financial, Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP and Loews Hotels & Resorts. It spun off Lorillard Inc., maker of Newport cigarettes, in 2008, after owning it for more than 30 years.

The Tisch family’s large philanthropic footprint in Manhattan included funding for the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and for Tisch Hospital, part of NYU’s Langone Medical Center. Laurence Tisch helped raise about $2 billion for the university, more than $40 million of which came directly from his family, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

Two sons of Laurence and Billie Tisch, James and Andrew, have long been involved in running Loews with their cousin, Jonathan. The other two sons are Thomas, managing partner at Tisch Financial, who stepped down as chancellor of Brown University in 2016; and Daniel, managing member of TowerView LLC, an investment fund of the family.

Jessica Tisch, a daughter of James, became New York City’s police commissioner in 2024.

Wilma Stein was born on June 25, 1927, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Asbury Park. She was one of two daughters of Joseph Stein, who ran a Cadillac dealership in Asbury Park, and his wife, Rose, a bookkeeper.

Though both her parents were Jewish, their ancestry — his family was from Germany, hers from Lithuania — made theirs “really a mixed marriage,” Tisch said in an oral-history interview with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

She majored in economics with a minor in accounting at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. After graduating in 1948 with a bachelor’s of science degree, she landed a job at Time Inc. and began commuting to New York City from Asbury Park.

A blind date with Laurence Tisch, who was known as Larry, changed her plans. Their “whirlwind courtship,” as she put it, culminated in their 1948 marriage, four months after their meeting.

They had their four sons in the following five years, while living at Tisch family-owned hotels in New Jersey and New York. They later settled in Scarsdale, New York.

Tisch began her philanthropic work by serving on the board of Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York. She joined the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies’ distribution committee, which decided how to apportion charitable grants, in 1969 and became chairman of the committee in 1975.

Female Leader

The federation had been founded in 1917 by philanthropists led by Felix Warburg, a partner in Wall Street firm Kuhn Loeb & Co. It merged in 1986 with the United Jewish Appeal.

Until Tisch’s election in 1980, the organization had been led by men — typically “a captain of industry or a financial wizard,” such as Lehman Brothers partner Arthur Lehman and Gustave Levy, senior partner at Goldman Sachs & Co., the New York Times reported in 1981.

The one exception to that rule, Madeleine Borg, had served out the unexpired term of a president who died in 1938, and was not elected herself, the Times said.

At the time, the group helped fund more than 100 agencies — including hospitals, childcare facilities and homes for seniors — serving 2 million New Yorkers. Today, the UJA-Federation has activities in more than 70 countries assisting 4.5 million people annually, according to its website.

The Times article described Tisch as “mild-mannered and gracious,” a woman who didn’t mind being described as “a traditional wife and mother.”

For her, the unpaid charitable post was “a seven-day and seven-night-a-week job,” she said, according to the Times. “My main problem is trying to do the job well and still maintain my family life.”

Her husband also was active in the UJA-Federation, serving on the board of trustees and leading its annual fundraising campaign. The organization honored the couple at a 1994 banquet in New York.