In 1960s Omaha, a rabbi lived on a modest salary from the congregation, played bridge with a neighbor a few blocks away, and spent two or three years resisting his wife’s quiet, persistent advice before finally finding the courage to…
In 1960s Omaha, Rabbi Myer Kripke and his wife, Dorothy, lived on the salary of a congregational rabbi. They had about $67,000 from an inheritance plus their own savings, according to Douglas Martin’s obituary of the rabbi in The New York Times. They also had a bridge table friend who lived a few blocks away. His name was Warren Buffett.
The remuneration of a rabbi and a children’s author
Myer Kripke was born January 21, 1914, in Toledo, Ohio, and was ordained a priest in 1937. That year he married Dorothy Karp under the tower of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the chancellor waived the fee because they lacked money. She later wrote children’s books, notably the “Parlons de Dieu” and “Parlons de Dieu” series.
After positions in Racine, Wisconsin, Patchogue, New York, and New London, Connecticut, he took over the Beth El Synagogue in Omaha with a starting salary of $7,500, serving from 1946 to 1975. According to the obituary, he never earned more than $30,000 a year there and never purchased real estate.
Bridge, rotating and kosher tuna salad
According to the rabbi’s account in a 2011 oral history, Susan Buffett called to ask Dorothy to discuss “Let’s Talk About God.” The women became friends and Susan drove Dorothy to her appointments. The men shared a Rotary Club and the Happy Hollow neighborhood. The couples played bridge, and at the Buffetts’ Thanksgiving, a hired cook prepared kosher tuna salad for the Kripkes. Buffett later attended the rabbi’s 90th birthday party. “It made me very important,” the rabbi told the Times.
Two or three years of cajoling
According to the obituary, Buffett then only took money in increments of $150,000 to $200,000. “He doesn’t want the kind of money we have,” the rabbi recalled to the Times. Dorothy’s advice: “Myer, invest the money with your friend Warren. » She continued for two or three years before he asked her shyly.
Buffett agreed without hesitation. “I loved Myer,” he told the Times, explaining that he wanted people “who, if things went wrong, we could still be friends with.” The obituary places the investment in 1966, the same year a fire destroyed the seminary tower where the couple had married.
Rich on paper, unchanged in practice
By the mid-1990s, the money Buffett managed was worth more than $25 million, according to the obituary. “It spread like an atomic bomb,” the rabbi said. The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997.
They rented a three-bedroom apartment in Omaha for $900 a month. When Dorothy asked him if he wanted a better car, he replied, “There’s nothing wrong with a Chevrolet.” »
They gave most of it away. Thirty years after the fire, they gave the seminary $7 million for the tower’s $11 million restoration, and the tower was renamed in their honor. They pledged an additional $8 million to be paid after their deaths and gave nearly $1 million to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, in honor of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.
Dorothy died in 2000. Rabbi died in Omaha on April 11, 2014, at age 100. Their son, Saul Kripke, is a Princeton philosopher. Their daughter, Madeline, has collected around 20,000 dictionaries.
A decision, left alone
The Kripkes made one choice, then did the hardest part: they gave up. Composition works best when no one interrupts it, and a couple happy with a Chevrolet and a rented apartment had no reason to interrupt it. Most of us will never get an invitation to a transition table from Warren Buffett, but you can always borrow his homework (we’ve rounded up the seven cheapest dividend payers in Berkshire’s portfolio in a free report here).
The rabbi credited fortune. “It was luck, just luck,” he said, as told by Doug Kass in TheStreet. Dorothy’s two or three years of cajoling suggest that chance had some help.
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