Jacob C. Gutman

He was president of Pressman-Gutman Corporation of New York City and Philadelphia, a textile manufacturing concern still in existence.

[4][5] Gutman became known in Philadelphia for bridging the social, financial, and educational divide between Jews whose families had emigrated to the United States from Germany and Austria prior to America's Civil War and those who, like Gutman's father, came from nations comprising the former Jewish Pale of Settlement—the present countries of Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and westernmost Russia—in the deluge of immigration associated with pogroms against Jews following the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881.

[6][7] Gutman retired from active management of Pressman-Gutman in 1962 after the death of his wife and spent the next twenty years devoting his energies to improving the lives of Jews in Philadelphia, in Israel, and around the world.

[8][9] Gutman was a trustee and honorary fellow of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and served as its secretary and treasurer.

[1] He was also a trustee of Dropsie University, which awarded him an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1965.