Jacob Hiatt

Jacob "Jack" Hiatt (July 1, 1908 – February 25, 2001) was a Lithuanian-American businessman and philanthropist.

Early life Hiatt was born to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire in 1908, the son of Joshua and Leah Hiatt.

In 1935 he immigrated to the United States, settling in Worcester, Massachusetts, where two of his brothers, Alexander and Sidney, lived. In February 1962, Dodge-Whitney and three other companies merged to create the Rand-Whitney Corporation. Hiatt remained in charge of Rand-Whitney until 1968, when his son-in-law, Robert Kraft, purchased half of the company in a leveraged buyout.

Hiatt was also president of Estey Investment Inc. and the Jacob Hiatt Income Trust and was an investor in the Educator Biscuit Co.

Philanthropy

Jewish causes Hiatt's parents, a brother, and his sisters were killed in the Holocaust.

After the death of his wife in 1980, Hiatt purchased a square block of land in Jerusalem for the creation of a park in her memory. He later became chairman of the university's investment committee.

Hiatt financed Brandeis' Jacob Hiatt Institute. The institute, located in Israel, was established in 1960 to allow students to study Israel's social and political institutions, contemporary Hebrew, and Israeli and Jewish history in the county. He also established the Frances L. Hiatt Career Development Program.

Clark University Hiatt served as a trustee of his alma mater, Clark University. In 1962, he gave the school $250,000 to establish a chair in European history. In 1990, he donated $7.5 million to establish the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education. The center was created to allow Clark faculty and Worcester public school teachers to work together on ways to improve public education, with an emphasis on issues related to the increased ethnic diversity of students. The donation was the largest in the university's history. In 1989, he also gave a large endowment to name the university's Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology. He remained on the board for over twenty years and also served on the President's Council. He also provided funding for a wing of the Holy Cross library, named after his parents, that is devoted to Holocaust studies. In 1990, Worcester Public Schools opened up an elementary school named after Hiatt - Jacob Hiatt Magnet School on Main Street. He later established the Frances Hiatt Exemplary School Program, which provided Worcester's elementary schools with $4,000 to $7,000 a year for educational purposes. He provided money for the creation of the Frances Hiatt Scholarships at the Worcester Art Museum and the Hiatt FAME (Fund for the Advancement of Museum Education).

Death Hiatt died on February 25, 2001, at his home in Worcester.