Laurie and I wish to offer our deepest and most sincere condolences to David, Dori, and to Sandy, who has taken such loving and devoted care of her parents in recent years, and to all members of the Eskenazi family, on the passing of Sidney Eskenazi over the weekend. Your grief is, I am sure, profound and without measure.
It is maybe a small consolation that Sidney and Lois passed away just three weeks apart, sparing each other the heartbreak of learning to live without their partner of over 70 years. Theirs was a true love story.
From the time Laurie and I first met Sid – he will always be Sid to me – and Lois when I became IU president in 2007, we became fast friends. We saw them quite regularly in the years that followed and stayed in contact with them almost until the end. They were a warm, considerate, and generous couple, utterly unaffected by their wealth and good fortune.
They were two of the most generous and consequential philanthropists the state has ever seen. Their goal was to make a true lasting difference with their philanthropy that would impact people’s lives for the better for generations to come, whether it be in health care, arts, education, or their Jewish faith. They had no time for, or interest in, the meretricious or ephemeral.
Over 14 years, I worked particularly closely with Sid, together with my colleagues Lauren Robel and Tom Morrison, on some major projects at IU that have added continuing and growing luster to the university’s academic reputation and will do so for years to come.
These projects were focused on the arts and culture, areas of the deepest interest to the Eskenazis as serious art collectors, and to Lois, herself an accomplished artist.
They had previously demonstrated this interest in the arts through the gifts they made earlier to the Herron School of Art + Design at IU’s Indianapolis campus.
In 2016, we announced an extraordinarily generous gift from the Eskenazis for a major renovation of the IU Bloomington Art Museum, which today is the magnificent Eskenazi Museum of Art, a gift that included the eventual donation to IU of their superb art collection. And in 2019, we announced that another gift would enable a new IU Bloomington school to be named the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.
The centerpiece of this gift enabled the construction of the Mies van der Rohe building that is now the center of the school. It was first designed by the legendary architect in 1952 for the IU Jewish fraternity Pi Lambda Phi, though it was never built. Due to their gift, it was finally built and dedicated in 2021. It will be the last building ever built designed by Mies.
This building was Sid’s pride and joy. He realized that he had made possible an architectural masterpiece. He recognized that it was like acquiring a Picasso or Rodin. He would take friends to visit it as his pride in it was boundless. In all the dozens of subsequent conversations we had, he always mentioned it. In the last sentence of the last message I ever received from him just a few short months ago, he mentioned it again with pride.
This touches only briefly on the extraordinary generosity of the Eskenazis. There is their impact on the Maurer School of Law and the School of Medicine at IU, and especially their immense impact on health care in Indianapolis through the gift they made to the community hospital that is today, Eskenazi Health.
At the passing of a member of the Jewish faith, it is customary to quote from the Book of Proverbs: “Zikhrono livrakha” – “May his memory be a blessing.” The memory of Sidney Eskenazi – and of Lois Eskenazi, will be a blessing for the people of Indiana that endures for all time.