August 19, 2004 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Zell Kravinsky, who donated most of his $45-million fortune to charity and then gave a kidney to someone he didn’t know, has such philanthropic zeal that his views and behavior can be shocking and perplexing to those around him, according to a profile in The New Yorker (August 2).
As he wrestles with questions of whether to give everything away and whether to subject his family to a life of poverty, the magazine says, his wife and many of his friends often become frustrated with his high moral standards. One of his closest friends almost ended his relationship with Mr. Kravinsky over the kidney donation: Mr. Kravinsky told the friend that his wife, Emily, could be considered guilty of murder for not going along with his plan to donate his kidney — because if he did not go through with it, someone would die.
Mr. Kravinsky, now 49, developed a strong social conscience at an early age, says the magazine. He eventually earned two Ph.D.’s at the University of Pennsylvania and then made his fortune in real estate, after growing up in a row house in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood “amid revolutionary rhetoric,” the magazine says.
Mr. Kravinsky says his father, Irving, a Russian immigrant who promoted socialist views, interpreted his son’s academic success as a sign of class disloyalty.
At the age of 12, Mr. Kravinsky picketed City Hall in support of public housing. At about the same time, however, he first invested in the stock market and, he told the magazine, he began to understand money better than his father had.
The push and pull between Mr. Kravinsky’s desire to earn money and his urge to give it to those in need has continued throughout his adult life. From the time he worked with troubled students in the Philadelphia public schools and undergraduate literature students at the University of Pennsylvania to the time he began buying and selling supermarkets, department stores, and warehouses, Mr. Kravinsky became determined to do good. “What I aspire to is ethical ecstasy,” he told the magazine.
By the end of 2003, he and his wife had given an 87,000-square-foot apartment building to a school for the disabled in Philadelphia and two gifts, worth $6.2-million, to the CDC Foundation.
They also created the Adria Kravinsky Foundation, named after his deceased sister, to support a school of public health at Ohio State University and financed it with $30-million in real estate.
But that wasn’t enough for Mr. Kravinsky, who has contemplated giving away his other kidney and other organs. “I used to feel that I had to be good, truly good in my heart and spirit, in order to do good,” he told the magazine. “But it’s the other way around: If you do good, you become better. With each thing I’ve given away, I’ve been more certain of the need to give more away.”
