Milt Feldman

Milt Feldman’s parents emigrated from Eastern Europe in the years leading up to World War I, settling in Queens, where Milt was born. When Milt graduated high school, World War II had already begun. He enrolled in Penn State and enlisted in the Army Reserve Corps, hoping he could stay long enough to finish school. He was only able to attend for 6 months before being called to active duty.

During that time, he met his future wife, Shirley Levine. Despite qualifying to become an army doctor or engineer, anti-Semitism was rampant in the military, so Milt was assigned to the 106th division and sent to active duty. In December of 1944, Milt was captured by German soldiers and became a Jewish American prisoner of war. It took two weeks of marching through the cold with no food to reach the Nazi camp, where he was held for four months.

Released by the Army in October 1945, Milt returned home and resumed classes at Penn State the following February. Milt and Shirley married, and she earned her master’s degree in sociology while Milt finished his undergraduate degree and enjoyed an incredibly successful career. He worked as an accountant in several different companies prior to founding his own successful firms, Feldman, Herbstman & Braverman, and later, Feldman & Zimmerman, CPAs.

In 2018, with the help of his stepson Seth Bauer, Milt published a thrilling and revealing memoir about his days as a World War 2 prisoner of war, titled: Captured, Frozen, Starved, and Lucky: How One Jewish American GI Survived a Nazi Stalag. The memoir details the day-to-day cruelty and deprivations of POW life and has been made into a documentary film honored and recognized at various film festivals.

Despite the suffering he endured in the army, Milt’s greatest pain occurred following the war. His daughter, Leslie, had some rough years following high school; when she was accepted to Pace, studying at the Pleasantville campus felt like a blessing. She was planning to become a teacher, so she chose to study education, earning straight As in her first semester. After that semester, the Feldman family forever changed. A tragic accident took the lives of both Leslie and her boyfriend, a fellow Pace student. Greif-stricken, Milt and his wife Leslie decided to turn their pain into something positive. In this spirit, they established the Leslie Jill Feldman Scholarship, to help education students like their daughter and business students like her boyfriend. Milt and Leslie designated the scholarship for low income students studying on the Pleasantville campus in those degree programs. They also sponsored a meditation garden in Leslie’s name. When Milt’s wife passed away several years later, Milt again turned to philanthropy to soften the blow. He expanded his donations to Pace and renamed the fund The Leslie Jill and Shirley Beth Feldman Scholarship. To this day, students can visit the Leslie Jill Feldman Meditation Garden, just across from Shirley Beth’s Way.

Milt passed away in March 2020, leaving a generous estate donation to the scholarship in memory of his wife and daughter. When asked about the scholarship, Milt’s son, Bob Feldman, had this to say:

“I think it shows the strength of my parents and the love and dedication they had to keep our family names going, and to give back to students in need…it’s a lesson that life has tragedy in it and you just can’t wallow. You have to do the best you can. My parents took the worst tragedy a person could imagine—a parent losing a child—and turned it into a way to help countless children of other parents get an education.”

Now, less than a year after his father’s passing, Bob is already planning on continuing his dad’s legacy.

“My dad started the donations because of grief, and he increased the donations after my mom’s passing. Now I will continue the family tradition of turning pain into helping others.”