David Shapell

David Shapell was born as David Czapelski on February 4, 1921, in Wolbrom, a shtetl in Poland.[1][2][3] His father was a goose farmer.[1]

During World War II, he escaped Poland and fought in the Polish army under Soviet control throughout the rest of the war.[2] By the end of the war, most of his family members had been murdered by the Nazis, except for one brother, Nathan Shapell, and a sister.[2]

Shortly after the war, he lived in Germany,[1] and emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s.[2]

Shapell first worked for a relative who owned a grocery store in Detroit, Michigan, alongside his brother Nathan.[1]

In 1955, they moved to Los Angeles, California, and co-founded a real estate development company with their brother-in-law, Max Webb.[1] It became known as Shapell Industries, one of the largest developers in Southern California.[4] It was acquired by Toll Brothers in 2013.[4]

He made charitable contributions to the Friends of the IDF, a fundraising organization for the Israel Defense Forces.[2] He also endowed the Darche Noam yeshiva and the Midreshet Rachel women's seminary in Jerusalem.[2] In 2006, he made a donation for the establishment of the David and Fela Shapell Family Shoah and Heroism Study Center for Youth at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.[5] Through the David and Fela Shapell Family Foundation, he has also endowed the David and Fela Shapell Digitalization Project at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.[6] He has also endowed the David and Fela Shapell Family Center for Genetic Disorders Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.[7]

He served on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.[3] In 2013, he made a donation of $15 million to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where The David and Fela Shapell Family Collections and Conservation Center is named in his honor.[3][8][9]

From 1979 to his death, Shapell, his wife and family paid an annual visit to Wolbrom or Auschwitz in honor of their relatives who were victims of Nazi Germany.[3][8] During those visits, they said Jewish prayers, also known as Kaddish, and lit candles in their memory.[3]

Shapell was an Orthodox Jew.[1] He was married to Fela Shapell, a Holocaust survivor who was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the war, for sixty-five years.[1][2] They had three children: Rochelle, Benjamin and Irvin.[2] They resided in Los Angeles, California.[3]

He died on February 8, 2015, in Israel after battling lung cancer and pneumonia.[1] He was ninety-four years old.[3] He was buried at the Eretz Hachaim Cemetery near Beit Shemesh, Israel.[2]