Business and Foundation Leader Marcy Syms Advances American Jewish Archives Work on Jewish Entrepreneurship

Marcy Syms, a supporter of the archival work conducted by Hebrew Union College’s Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA), says her interest in information and the public’s access to it goes back to when she was nine years old. That was when her father, the retail entrepreneur and humanitarian Sy Syms, ran for City Council in Yonkers, New York.

“It was my first introduction to democracy, and politics, and what it took to get information to people before they made a decision on something,” she says. “And it was very instructive at an early age to see all the touchpoints at which people gather information, whether we were handing out leaflets or ringing doorbells, or having a picture taken of us to be seen in the local newspaper, or getting 10 minutes on a public affairs program on Sunday morning on a local radio station.”

That early experience has shaped all the work that Marcy Syms has done since, as an independent director for private and public companies, a social entrepreneur, a supporter of public broadcasting, and the founding trustee and President of the Sy Syms Foundation, which supports programs in education, scientific research, societal justice, and the arts.

Syms says her father, born in Brooklyn in 1926 to immigrant parents form Russia, had the good fortune to be granted a G.I. bill, and he was able to get a college education. Sy Syms went on to found the men’s clothing store in the 1950s that became the chain Syms Corp., and which Marcy Syms would lead after her father’s retirement.

Marcy Syms points out that, in the small community around the Lincoln Park Jewish Center in Yonkers where the family relocated after leaving Brooklyn, her father was just one of several entrepreneurs who started companies that came to be nationally recognized. “These were people who were not waiting around. They burst out on the scene in American capitalism full force.”

Syms says the experience of her father and his community is emblematic of something essential about the American Jewish experience in the 20th century, and the centrality of entrepreneurship in that story. “I think that Jews, in particular, because of our very nomadic life, the demands of us picking up every third or fifth generation to transform a city, a town, a shtetl or whatever it is, are entrepreneurial by necessity,” she says. “And having the opportunity in America where the free flow of ideas and the legal opportunity for banking, and for signing leases without bringing in a non-Jew to co-sign, there were just so many things that made the American experience as a Jew so unique within the history of being Jewish. And I felt that keenly watching my father start a business as an entrepreneur.”

As she became more deeply involved with the growth, governance, and marketing of the family business, Marcy Syms built her own career as CEO of Syms Corp, and was one of the youngest women to be named President of a publicly traded NYSE company. When Syms Corp went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1983, much of the proceeds went to establishing the Sy Syms Foundation. The first project for the Foundation was the creation of a business school bearing the Sy Syms name at Yeshiva University in New York City. Today, that school has close to 1,000 students and is the largest part of Yeshiva’s undergraduate program.

As part of her effort to make sure future generations would have an understanding of her father’s generation of business innovators, and her own continuation of that legacy, Marcy Syms began asking herself what institution would be the best keeper of the family’s papers. “The materials that represent a lifetime – my father’s, our companies’, my lifetime – where can that reside, for those interested in how we might have contributed, particularly how Sy Syms the entrepreneur and the visionary contributed to the Jewish American experience?”

Through her longtime friendship with sociologist, author, and philanthropist Georgette Bennett, who founded the Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum Foundation (now the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding) in honor of her late husband, Marcy Syms became connected to the Hebrew Union College’s American Jewish Archives. At AJA, she says she found “the whole attitude and mindset to be so receptive and really, really welcoming.”

“The focus at AJA fit comfortably into how I thought someone would research my father, myself, the company we created and the impact on the Jewish community. After a visit, my exposure to the rare books collection, to the opportunity for interns and the educational aspects of the mandate that AJA has for educating those involved with archival endeavors was very comforting, and is something I believe in.”

Founded in 1947, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives is the largest free-standing repository dedicated solely to the study of the American Jewish experience. It contains more than 15 million pages of documents, audio-visual recordings, microfilm, and photographic images.

In addition to bringing her family’s materials to AJA, Marcy Syms and the trustees of the Sy Syms Foundation have also approved a $2 million grant to support the archive, in particular its ongoing work to digitize its materials. She says the experience of the pandemic made her – and the public broadly – more aware of the benefits of making more archival materials available online.

“To my mind, anyone who has incorporated Zoom into their lives at that basic level since Covid can immediately understand why digitization is so important. All of a sudden, you do not have to go to a museum and stand there, because digitization allows people who might be related to me in Ukraine, or in South Africa, to quickly view, from their own computer, information that’s in the Syms Collection. I think this should be an age of rapid digitization! I think there’s an opportunity at this moment for a great acceleration in the importance of digitizing.”

Syms’ gift also funds a full-time position to support and expand public programming at the AJA. “There are so many programmatic opportunities that I wanted there to be an archivist who could work on these programs,” she says. In particular, she adds, she would like to develop programming to look at the Jewish entrepreneurs who, like her father, “benefited from the G.I. bill and transformed business in America and created opportunities – not just for Jews, but for the larger society in a way that has transformed America.”

“The establishment of the Syms Endowment Fund is a truly transformational gift that comes at a critical juncture in our institution’s history,” said Dana Herman, Ph.D., Associate Director of Research and Collections at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. “We are excited to begin working on several initiatives that will expand the reach of the AJA in new and innovative ways. We hope this initiative will encourage others with similar types of collections to donate their material to the American Jewish Archives, and that our current business archives—of which the Syms material is crucial—will be easily accessed and deeply explored by our patrons and online users.”

“At this moment in particular, where we see just how crucial access to information is for the understanding not only of our history, but for our democracy itself, the work of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives of Hebrew Union College is more important than ever,” said Hebrew Union College President Andrew Rehfeld, Ph.D. “Marcy Syms has a profound understanding of the importance of AJA and its place in telling the Jewish American story. We are grateful that she and the Sy Syms Foundation have taken steps to support the AJA, strengthening its research and the longevity of its collections.”