Norman Bernstein, D.C. real estate developer and philanthropist, dies at 100

By Harrison Smith,

Norman Bernstein, a Washington real estate developer and philanthropist who championed Jewish causes and housing desegregation, encouraging local property owners to open their apartment buildings to African Americans in the early 1960s, died July 5 at his home in the District. He was 100.

The cause was pneumonia, said his son Joshua Bernstein.

A son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Lithuania, Mr. Bernstein launched his real estate career in 1940, at age 19, raising money from friends and family to buy rowhouses with his older brother, Leo. As the market took off after World War II, they started acquiring larger office and apartment buildings while aiming to buy, repair and sell homes within 90 days. Their slogan: “Your neighbor bought from us.”

Mr. Bernstein split from his brother in 1953 to launch his own firm, Norman Bernstein Management, and build projects such as Watergate Village in Annapolis, the Cambridge Apartments in downtown Washington and Twin Oaks in Petworth. Now known as Bernstein Management Corp., the company owns and manages more than 80 properties, including 3.5 million square feet of commercial space and over 5,100 apartments.

The firm’s success made Mr. Bernstein an influential business leader in Washington, where he supported the arts and backed Jewish community groups, serving on the boards of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Arena Stage, Adas Israel Congregation and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.

He also befriended Israeli statesman Yitzhak Rabin — a frequent tennis partner who stayed at his homes in Washington and Woods Hole, Mass. — when Rabin was serving as ambassador to the United States in the 1960s. After Rabin was assassinated in 1995 while serving as prime minister, Mr. Bernstein and his wife, Diane, helped found the Yitzhak Rabin Center, a library and museum in Tel Aviv.

Mr. Bernstein was something of a Renaissance man, a student of literature and art who took night classes at George Washington University, collected antique American furniture and restored the Lindens, an 18th-century Kalorama mansion that he and his wife lived in for more than two decades. He taught himself to ski and sail in his 20s; began raising Hereford cattle on an 800-acre farm in his 40s; and learned to trap lobsters in his 50s, buying books on crustacean behavior before going out on the water near Cape Cod.

At times, he also took an activist’s role in social issues. After World War II, he and his brother were part of a business group that raised $40,000 to buy a ramshackle Chesapeake Bay steamship for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization. The ship was renamed the Exodus 1947 and used to ferry more than 4,500 Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, from France to British-controlled Palestine in July 1947.

The refugees had no legal authority to disembark and were blocked by British naval forces in a skirmish that left three people dead. While the group was forced to return to Europe, the voyage helped rally support for the creation of Israel and inspired Leon Uris’s best-selling 1958 novel “Exodus.”

Mr. Bernstein later called on his peers to end racial discrimination in housing, prompted by a 1961 meeting between Kennedy administration officials and 54 local property owners and managers. The White House and State Department had been trying for months to find adequate housing for the families of African diplomats, who said they had been turned away from apartments because of the color of their skin.

At a three-hour closed meeting, officials including Harris Wofford, special assistant to the president, pleaded with the business executives to offer housing for the diplomats, framing the issue as a threat to national security. Nearly a dozen property owners said they would find housing, according to news reports. Mr. Bernstein went further than the rest.

In addition to offering apartments in three of his buildings, he proposed a resolution to open all of the city’s housing to African Americans, not just to Black diplomats. “It would be hypocritical to say that we are going to open our buildings to a few African diplomats and not open them to colored American citizens,” he said.

His motion was backed by the State Department but tabled at the meeting.

Mr. Bernstein went on to open up his buildings to Black residents and encouraged others to do the same in the years before the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which outlawed racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals. “For months, he pushed and cajoled and tried to get others to join him,” his son Joshua said in a phone interview.

Some White residents left in protest. Far more moved out after the 1968 riots.

“After the riots there was basically White flight east of 16th Street. It took a long time for the city to heal,” said Joshua, who took over the family business with a partner, Robert Sandler, in 1993. “My father said, ‘East of 16th Street is a risky place to invest.’ ” But the area later underwent a development boom, with thousands moving in and less affluent residents, many of them Black, forced out by gentrification. He added, “That was the only bad advice he gave me.”

[Opinion: 60 years after my father stood for civil rights, there’s still work to be done in D.C.]

Mr. Bernstein was born in Washington on Jan. 21, 1921, two months premature. “If this child survives, he is more than a man and we will name him Morman,” his father declared, according to the family. Morman Bernstein went by Norman beginning in high school but never legally changed his name.

His mother worked as a seamstress in Baltimore before having children and died when Norman was 12. His father was a butcher who partnered with a brother to open Washington’s first Army-Navy store; they sold the shop in 1929, using the proceeds to buy 10 rental properties, which were later managed by Mr. Bernstein and his brother.

Mr. Bernstein received an accounting degree from the former Columbus University in Washington and served in the Navy during World War II, working in cryptology while stationed in the District. In 1962, he founded Columbia Realty Trust, a publicly owned real estate investment firm that he took private as Columbia Realty Venture in 1974.

His wife of 66 years, the former Diane Diamond, championed children’s causes and was once arrested at a voting rights demonstration. She died April 30, nine weeks before Mr. Bernstein. He credited her with spurring his interest in civil rights issues.

In addition to his son Joshua, of Washington, survivors include five other children, Celia Bernstein of Los Angeles, Marianne Bernstein of Chicago, Nancy Bernstein of Pittsburgh, Susan Bernstein of Cambridge, Mass., and Elizabeth Norton of Brooklyn; and 12 grandchildren.

Mr. Bernstein and his wife formed the Diane and Norman Bernstein Foundation in the early 1960s. Last year, the organization announced that it would honor his 100th birthday by donating $12 million to local nonprofit groups, including the Kennedy Center and the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington.