From the Palatinate to Georgia
Nathan Straus was born on January 31, 1848, in Otterberg, a small town in the Palatinate, then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the third child of Lazarus Straus and his second wife, Sara, a German Jewish family whose other children were Hermine, Isidor and Oscar. Lazarus emigrated to the United States, and in 1854 Sara and the children followed him to Georgia, where he opened a general store in the small town of Talbotton.
Lazarus Straus was a learned man, fluent in Hebrew, who sometimes invited Protestant ministers to dinner to discuss the Torah. The family’s life in the antebellum South carried its own contradictions: although they opposed slavery, they took on several enslaved people to help care for Sara after she suffered a stroke. In 1863, after local officials in Talbotton publicly questioned the loyalty of Talbotton’s Jewish merchants to the Confederacy, the family moved to Columbus, Georgia, an early brush with antisemitism that Nathan never forgot. The war ruined them, and when it ended the Strauses moved north to New York City to begin again.
Crockery, Macy’s and Abraham & Straus
In New York Lazarus founded L. Straus & Sons, a firm importing crockery and glassware, and his sons joined the business. One of their customers was R. H. Macy & Company, the department store on Sixth Avenue, where the Strauses ran the crockery department. The relationship deepened: Nathan and his brother Isidor became partners in Macy’s in 1888 and, by 1896, its owners. They built it into one of the largest stores in the world.
In 1893 the two brothers also bought into a Brooklyn dry-goods store, Wechsler & Abraham, which was renamed Abraham & Straus and became one of the borough’s great retail institutions. Nathan had a reputation as a humane employer. Noticing that some of his workers were going hungry to save their wages for their families, he set up what may have been one of the first subsidized staff lunchrooms.
On April 28, 1875, he married Lina Gutherz. They had six children, three of whom died young: Sara as a baby in 1878, Roland as a small boy in 1884, and their eldest son, Jerome, as a teenager in 1893. The losses marked the couple deeply, and at least one of the deaths was thought to have been caused by contaminated milk.
Milk that killed
In the late nineteenth century, milk was one of the most dangerous foods in America. Cows were often kept in filthy city stables, milk was carried long distances without refrigeration, and it could carry tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever and diphtheria. In 1890 roughly a quarter of American babies died before their first birthday, and tainted milk was a leading cause. Scientists already knew that gently heating milk could kill dangerous bacteria, a process named after Louis Pasteur, but the dairy industry and public authorities were slow to act.
Straus decided not to wait. In 1893, at his own expense, he opened the first of his milk depots in New York, beginning on June 1, 1893, with a station at the foot of the East Third Street pier on the Lower East Side. They sold pasteurized milk, bottled in clean conditions, for a few cents, and gave it free to families who could not pay. Mothers could also attend talks on child care and nutrition. The depots were so popular that more opened the following year, and the network grew to eighteen in the city. Where the stations operated, infant deaths fell sharply, and he is credited with saving many thousands of children.
A crusade for pasteurization
Straus spent decades campaigning for pasteurization to become the law, not just a charity. He lectured, lobbied and paid for pasteurization plants in other American cities and abroad, and by 1920 hundreds of milk stations had been set up with his support in the United States and overseas. He and Lina later published Disease in Milk: The Remedy, Pasteurization, a record of the campaign.
His concern for children went further. In 1909 he opened a tuberculosis preventorium for children in Lakewood, New Jersey. President William Howard Taft named him the sole U.S. delegate to the International Congress for the Protection of Infants in Berlin in 1911, and he represented the country at a tuberculosis congress in Rome in 1912. In 1920 he gave his pasteurization plant to New York City and handed the depots over to public agencies, and in the following decades pasteurization became the legal standard across the United States.
Public servant of New York
Straus also served the city directly. He sat on the Board of Education from 1889 to 1891, was a parks commissioner from 1890 to 1894, and in the late 1890s became president of the city’s Board of Health. In 1894 the Democratic machine of Tammany Hall chose him as its candidate for mayor, but he withdrew from the race.
During the economic panic of 1893 and the hard winters that followed, he used his milk depots to sell coal for a few cents to those who could pay and gave it free to those who could not. He opened lodging houses where homeless people could get a bed and breakfast for five cents, and funded cheap meals. In the winter of 1914–15, after he retired from business to devote himself to charity, his depots served more than a million penny meals to the unemployed. Shortly after the First World War, he travelled to Asheville, North Carolina, to lay a wreath at the monument to Zebulon Vance, the Civil War–era governor of North Carolina who had become known for his speeches against antisemitism, and paid for a fence around it as a “debt of gratitude.” In 1923 a public poll named him the person who had done the most for New York’s welfare over the preceding quarter century.
Zionist in deed
In 1904 Nathan and Lina visited Palestine during a Mediterranean tour and were overwhelmed. “All that we saw in the Holy Land made such a deep impression on us” he wrote, that they gave up their plans to visit other places, and from then on they felt “a strange and intense desire to return to the land.” They became committed Zionists.
Over the following decades they poured money into Palestine. They funded soup kitchens and workrooms that employed jobless Jews and Arabs, health stations that fought malaria and trachoma, and, with Henrietta Szold of Hadassah, a home-nursing service and the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He backed Jewish farmers, supported the Hebrew University, and contributed to efforts to bring electricity to the country. By some accounts the couple gave away about two-thirds of their fortune to improve conditions for both Arabs and Jews there. In the United States he helped launch Jewish war relief in 1917 with one of the largest single gifts and helped found the American Jewish Congress.
The Titanic and a family tragedy
Accounts differ in detail, but in the spring of 1912 Nathan and Lina were travelling abroad with his brother Isidor and Isidor’s wife, Ida, and visited Palestine together. Isidor was eager to go home, while Nathan, absorbed in his work there, chose to stay on. Isidor and Ida went ahead and sailed for New York on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. When the ship struck an iceberg on the night of April 14–15, Ida refused a place in a lifeboat rather than leave her husband, and both died. Their devotion became one of the most remembered stories of the disaster.
Nathan later said he felt he had been spared. He retired from business in 1914, leaving the stores to the next generation, and gave the rest of his life to philanthropy.
Final years
In his last years Straus remained one of the best-known philanthropists in America, honoured in New York and in Palestine. Nathan died in Manhattan on January 11, 1931, a few weeks before his eighty-third birthday, and was buried at Beth El Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens. In Palestine, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, mourned him as “a treasure-store of mercy and kindness.” His son Nathan Straus Jr. became a New York state senator and later led the U.S. Housing Authority, and his daughter Sissie married Irving Lehman, later chief judge of New York’s Court of Appeals.
Legacy
The coastal city of Netanya, founded in the late 1920s north of Tel Aviv, takes its name from him: Natan is the Hebrew form of Nathan. Its founders had hoped he would help fund the new town, but by then he had already given most of his fortune away. A street in Jerusalem, Rehov Straus, also bears his name.
His deepest legacy is harder to see because it is everywhere. The safe, pasteurized milk that families across the world take for granted today owes much to a department-store owner who, having buried three of his own children, decided that no parent should lose a child to a glass of milk. A 2026 biography by Andrew Fisher calls him a “Macy’s magnate” turned international humanitarian, and the countless children who lived because of his depots are the clearest measure of what he achieved.
Sources & further reading
Nathan Straus, Wikipedia · Nathan Straus, Jewish Virtual Library · Nathan Straus made his fortune at Macy’s and spent it fighting disease in New York and Palestine, JTA (2026) · Nathan & Lina Straus, JNS · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.