Obituaries from page 64
Co-founder Of Staples
B
OSTON (JTA) — Entrepreneur
Leo Kahn, a co-founder of Staples
whose impact on the world of
retailing can be found in offices and
kitchens across the United States, died
May 11, 2011 in Boston at age 94.
Kahn co-founded Staples, now a $27
billion business, with onetime competitor
Thomas Stemberg in 1986, two years after
selling the Purity Supreme supermarket
chain, the Boston-based family business
he built from a wholesale grocer into an
$800 million company.
Stemberg and Kahn became friends
who attended basketball games at their
alma mater, Harvard, and then brain-
stormed ideas for niches in the retail
world. After rejecting pantyhose, pet
products, medical supplies and tele-
phones as categories for a "super store"
approach, they settled on office supplies.
Ever restless, in 1991 Kahn started
Fresh Fields, a health-oriented gro-
cery store he later sold to Whole Foods
in 1996. In 1997, he opened Nature's
Heartland, a natural foods supermarket.
Violin Virtuoso
Failures — the
hallmark of a
"serial entre-
preneur" —
included a dis-
count auto parts
store, a Legal
Sea Foods fish
market spinoff
and an upscale
grocery store in
Phoenix.
Leo Kahn
Kahn once
said in a talk that entrepreneurs must
grow with their concepts and know when
to change and when to be true to their
original principles.
Kahn was born in Medford, Mass., to
parents from Lithuania. He graduated
from Harvard, earned a master's degree
in journalism from Columbia University
in New York City and worked as a news-
paper reporter before service in the Army
Air Corps during World War II. He estab-
lished several endowed professorships at
Harvard.
L
ONDON (JTA) — Endre
Wolf, a concert and orches-
tral violinist who had a
major career in Europe after escap-
ing the Nazis in World War II, died
March 29 at 97.
Wolf performed throughout
Europe and England in the years
after the war, and his violin playing
was called "eloquence and sheer
wizardry." His performance of
the Brahms Violin Concerto with
the Sinfonia of London in 1958 is
considered a landmark both for its
performance and its use of stereo
in the recording. A downloadable
version is now available.
Wolf was born in what is now
Chernivtsi in Ukraine and grew
up in Hungary. He began playing
violin as a boy. He was denied a
university education in engineer-
ing because of quotas on Jews and
received a passport to Sweden in
1936 after getting a letter of invita-
tion to play with the Gothenburg
A New Community Connection
Times have changed. And so has our community. Too often, we
hear from families who are now spread out across the country,
,1!ino us that It
ones are not able to make it home in t me for
4
a funera
The Ira Kaufman Chapel proudly now offers a new,
service –•Web streaming of funerals that can be viewed over any
Internet connection, anywhere in the wor;d : live and/or arch'ved,
t !10 cost to you.
THE IRA KAUFMAN CHAPEL
Brining Togctimr
& Community
18325 Al. Nine Mile Road southfieid, Mi 42075 248.569.0020
66 May 26
s
2011
Obituaries
rakaufmati.com
Endre Wolf
Symphony Orchestra. His aunt told
Hungarian police: "Here is another
opportunity to get rid of a Jew."
He performed throughout
Sweden during the war and secured
Swedish passports for his family,
which kept them safe in Budapest.
After the war, Wolf taught and
performed throughout Great
Britain, as well as at the Royal
Danish Academy of Music in
Copenhagen and the Royal College
of Music in Stockholm. He per-
formed on his 90th birthday in
Sweden's Lund Cathedral. I I