FINANCE
New Mart Owner Donates $15 Million to LA Jewish Home
Many know Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer as the force behind The New Mart building, an upscale showroom building in the heart of the Los Angeles Fashion District.
But she is also a major philanthropist who donates to so many causes it is hard to keep track of them all.
Her latest philanthropic donation, which is for $15 million, was made to the Los Angeles Jewish Home. The donation was announced on March 6.
The $15 million is part of the home’s $215 million “Keeping the Vision” campaign. Eisenberg-Keefer’s donation is being earmarked for the Gonda Healthy Aging Westside Campus in Playa Vista, Calif.
In the past, Eisenberg-Keefer has donated to the Los Angeles Jewish Home’s Eisenberg Village campus in Reseda, Calif.; the Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer Medical Center; the neighborhood homes on Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer Lane at the Los Angeles Jewish Home; and the courtyard and sky terrace at the Gonda Healthy Aging Westside Campus.
“Joyce’s vision is matched only by her charitable giving, for which we will be forever grateful,” said Jeffrey Glassman, board chairman of the Los Angeles Jewish Home, based in Reseda.
Eisenberg-Keefer supports a number of organizations and institutions, many dedicated to promoting and fighting cancer. Her late husband, Ben E. Eisenberg, contracted melanoma in the mid-1970s but lived for several more years.
In 1980, Eisenberg, a real estate entrepreneur who owned many other properties in downtown Los Angeles, purchased what was then known as the Harris Newmark building, an apparel manufacturing facility. He started to convert the 1926 12-story structure into an elegant edifice that housed apparel showrooms.
In 1983, the building was renamed The New Mart. Three years later, Eisenberg transferred title to The New Mart Building, as well as all his other properties, to The Ben and Joyce Eisenberg Foundation, a charitable trust with the provision that all profits be donated to several pre-selected charities, primarily in the fields of medical research and the care of children and the elderly.
When Ben Eisenberg passed away in 1986, his wife became the foundation’s president. Joyce continued The New Mart’s transformation that had been Ben’s vision, and, by late 1987, the transition from a manufacturing facility to a showroom building was completed.
