Widow with Baltimore ties donates $1B to NYC school

Albert Einstein College will now be tuition-free

A New York City medical school will be tuition-free for all students from now on thanks to a $1 billion donation from a former professor who was born to a prominent Baltimore couple and is the widow of a Wall Street investor.

Ruth Gottesman, a 1948 graduate of the Friends School of Baltimore, announced the gift and its purpose to students and faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine on

Monday, bringing some in the audience to tears and others to their feet, cheering.

Gottesman, 93, has been affiliated with the college for 55 years and is the chairperson of its board of trustees.

Gottesman is the daughter of longtime Baltimore residents Eleanor Kohn Levy, a philanthropist whose father co-founded the Hochschild Kohn & Co. department store chain, and Lester S. Levy, who was an executive for his grandfather’s business, the Baltimore straw hat company M.S. Levy and Sons. The couple was among the founders of the Owings Mills-based Central Scholarship Bureau, which provides financial aid for Maryland high school graduates.

The $1 billion gift to Einstein is intended to attract a diverse pool of applicants who otherwise might not have the means to attend. It will also let students graduate without debt that can take decades to repay, college administrators said. Tuition at Einstein is $59,458 per year. The average medical school debt in the U.S. is $202,453, excluding undergraduate debt, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Gottesman credited her late husband, David “Sandy” Gottesman, for leaving her with the financial means to make such a donation. The former Ruth Levy married the investor in Pikesville in 1950.

David Gottesman, who died in 2022 at age 96, built the Wall Street investment house, First Manhattan, and was on the board of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett purchased Hochschild Kohn in 1966, though he sold it roughly three years later.

“I feel blessed to be given the great privilege of making this gift to such a worthy cause,” Ruth Gottesman said. Through a spokesperson, she later declined an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

The gift is believed to be the largest made to any medical school in the country, according to Montefiore Einstein, the umbrella organization for Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Montefiore Health System.

Einstein becomes the second tuition-free medical school in New York. In 2018, New York University School of Medicine announced that it would cover the tuition of all its students.

Gottesman joined Einstein’s Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center in 1968 and developed screening and treatments for learning problems. She started the first-of-its-kind Adult Literacy Program at the center in 1992, and in 1998 was named the founding director of the Emily Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities at CERC. She is clinical professor emerita of pediatrics at Einstein.

Through their foundation, the Gottesman Fund, the family has supported charities in Israel and within the U.S. Jewish community, especially through gifts to schools, universities and New York City’s American Museum of Natural History.

Gottesman’s father, a 1918 Johns Hopkins University graduate, was also a sheet music collector who donated his collection — including a first-edition copy of “The Star-Spangled Banner” — to his alma mater. He died in 1989, and his wife died in 1994. Both lived their later lives in Pikesville.

“I feel blessed to be given the great privilege of making this gift to such a worthy cause.” — Ruth Gottesman