obituaries
Obituaries from page 72
The 'Pearl King'
(JTA) — Salvador Assael, the
widely acknowledged "Pearl
King:' who created million-
dollar jewelry for royalty and
celebrities, died April 1, 2011,
in New York at 88. In recent
years, he became a philanthro-
pist of Jewish and particularly Salvador Assael
Sephardic causes.
Assael's pearls have been sold by the world's best-
known jewelers, including Tiffany, Cartier and Harry
Winston. His clients included Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret
Thatcher, Nancy Reagan and Brooke Astor.
He grew up in a wealthy family of Turkish Jews in Italy,
the son of a diamond trader. The family fled Italy in 1939
to Havana, where they settled after his father bribed a
corrupt Cuban customs official. Two years later, they
moved to New York. Assael served in Europe as a U.S. sol-
dier during World War II and fought in the Battle of the
Bulge.
After the war, by trading watches in Japan for pearls,
and with an eye for spectacular products, he began buy-
ing and trading larger and larger pearls in the South
Pacific, as well as building the market for black pearls.
Abstract
Expressionist
(JTA) — Hedda Sterne,
whose artwork spanned
seven decades and even
more styles, died April
9, 2011, in her New York
home at 100.
Sterne, who eschewed
Hedda Sterne
the label Abstract
Expressionist and yet
was one of the last remaining artists of that school, was
active as an artist into her 90s, despite cataracts. She
had stopped painting but drew with white crayons on
white paper, using a magnifying glass.
Sterne, born Hedwig Lindenberg in Bucharest, began
her work as an artist while she was a young woman in
Romania. She fled for Paris in 1939.1t was frighten-
ing," she said in a 1980 interview. "I barely escaped with
— escaped alive."
In New York, her prior association with Guggenheim
helped get her settled and connected to the city's
burgeoning modern art scene. A year later, her work
appeared in "First Papers of Surrealism," one of the first
exhibitions of that style in the United States.
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74 April 21 2011
iN
Obituaries
Noted
Philanthropist
(JTA) —
Philanthropist Ann
Loeb Bronfman,
who supported a
range of causes
through the foun-
dation that she
Ann Bronfman
founded and ran,
has died.
Bronfman, a
former summer resident of Mackinac Island,
died April 5, 2011, from complications from
emphysema in Washington, D.C., surrounded
by her five children. She was 78.
She funded and directed programs
through the Ann L. Bronfman Foundation.
The causes she supported included educa-
tion, senior citizens, underserved youth, the
arts and victims of domestic abuse.
Bronfman attended Bennington College
in Bennington, Vt., before marrying her
husband, Edgar M. Bronfman, in 1953. They
were divorced in 1973.