Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus poses for a portrait at a Home Depot store on October 15, 1998. (Erik Lesser/Liaison via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot and A Republican megadonor A supporter of civil and political causes in the United States and Israel has died.

Marcus, 95, died late Monday in Boca Raton, Florida. His death came on the eve of the election, when he poured millions of dollars into supporting Donald Trump and Republicans across the country.

In the last political donation publicly recorded before his death, made in July, Marcus gave $1 million to the United Democracy Project, a campaign fundraising group affiliated with pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which he has supported since its founding in 2022.

“Home Depot is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved founder Bernard Marcus,” the company he founded in 1978 said in a statement announcing Marcus’ death. “He was just ‘Bernie’ to us.”

According to Forbes, Marcus donated more than $2 billion to various causes throughout his life, leaving behind an estimated net worth of $11 billion, much of which will go to the Marcus Foundation.

The company said Marcus, who was born in 1929 to Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, “never lost sight of his humble roots, using his success not for fame or fortune but to generously help others.”

Marcus’s legacy includes the transformation of downtown Atlanta with the establishment of the Georgia Aquarium; a major advance in autism awareness and research, thanks to the Marcus Autism Center, also in Atlanta; and the establishment of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, a major think tank focused on governance.

“The State of Israel has lost one of its greatest friends, and I have lost my wisest mentor,” IDI President Yohanan Plesner said in a statement.

Towards the end of his life, Marcus, along with his wife Billi, became perhaps best known for their staunch support of Donald Trump, ranking second only to Sheldon Adelson among conservative Jewish megadonors. Marcus helped put Trump into the White House by contributing $7 million in 2016 and donated even more to finance his unsuccessful reelection campaign four years later. Last year, he said he planned to support Trump again in this year’s election despite the former president’s felony convictions and “brash tone.”

“We must change the current course of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years.” In a November 2023 column supporting Trump, Marcus wrote:. “We must also reject calls by some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism.”

Marcus also defended former Trump advisor Steve Bannon against accusations of anti-Semitism and harboring extremism. At some point, Home Depot fends off calls to boycott the company over Marcus’ politics.

Unlike Adelson, his peer in philanthropy and Republican politics, Marcus has been careful to avoid taking sides in the country’s fractured parliamentary politics when donating money in Israel. In addition to the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, he has also donated to causes such as health care, including the Marcus National Blood Services Center, which was established with a $25 million donation.

His philanthropy in Israel was rooted in his sense of identity. “I am proud of the fact that I am Jewish and that if I can do something about it, what happened in the Holocaust will never happen again.” he said In a comprehensive profile published by Philanthropy Magazine in 2012.

While some focused on threats from outside, Marcus was primarily concerned about how the country’s own government structures were harming the country’s viability.

“Unless Israel has a constitution and a Bill of Rights, the rule of law is obscure. And I’m a great believer in the rule of law,” he said in 2012. Israel still does not have a constitution.

Born months before the start of the Great Depression, Marcus was raised in an apartment in Newark, New Jersey, by immigrant parents from Russia.

As a teenager during World War II and its aftermath, he practiced magic and hypnosis with his family on trips to the Catskills. The experience of reading and pleasing an audience helped seed his dream of becoming a psychiatrist. However, Marcus’ family could not afford to send him to medical school, so he became a pharmacist. (He also said he was rejected because of quotas limiting Jewish registration.)

He wasn’t too interested in the technical side of the field, but he enjoyed sales. This realization led him to become a retail manager, and he took on increasingly larger roles until he landed at a chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles.

After leaving the company at the age of 49, amid corporate turmoil, Marcus joined Arthur Blank to launch a new home improvement retailer with a vision to transform the industry.

The duo chose Atlanta as a starting point, found investors and quickly opened a series of stores under the Home Depot brand. They tapped into a huge unmet demand among Americans to fix up their own homes. Unlike old-school hardware stores, Home Depot offered a massive warehouse space stocked not only with tools but also paint and lumber; this often required visiting individual retailers.

During Marcus’ 19 years as CEO, Home Depot became a ubiquitous American brand. He remained chairman of the company’s board of directors until 2002, when he left to focus on distributing the wealth he had accumulated.

In 2010, Marcus signed the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s initiative to encourage the ultra-rich to donate more of their money to charity. Later in 2020, it joined the Jewish Future Pledge, which promises signers to dedicate most of their wealth to Jewish or Israel-related causes.

Marcus was raised to give away his money. he said in an interviewPointing to the memory of his mother, who sometimes refused to give him a penny in exchange for ice cream, he said the money instead went to plant trees in Israel.

Marcus was proud of his company’s success in instilling the value of tzedakah, or philanthropy, in its employees. “Kids come out of working at Home Depot and they all have this feeling of tzedakah. I made them all Jews!” he was once quoted as saying.

The greatest and most notable acts of charity were not necessarily dedicated to Jewish causes. He was an important patron of civil institutions in Georgia. In the late 1990s, Marcus and then-Georgia governor Roy Barnes returned to Atlanta after a tour of Israel. During the flight, Marcus said he wanted to give a gift to the city of Atlanta and propose an aquarium that would facilitate the redevelopment of downtown. This conversation resulted in the Georgia Aquarium, one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world, which opened in 2005. $250 million donation from Marcus.

An employee’s struggle to parent a child with autism sparked Marcus’ interest in the subject; Marcus championed this cause by founding the Marcus Center for Autism, a world-leading institute, and leading a research and advocacy group called Autism Speaks.

Also in the healthcare field, he was a major donor to the Shepherd Center in Atlanta for spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation and a founding donor to a neuroscience institute at Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida.

Marcus was also influential in the field of philanthropy; He modeled a business-like mentality that always sought to obtain as large a return as possible on philanthropic investment. His libertarian ideology and belief in the free market also guided his contributions to advocacy against government regulation.

In his final years, Marcus became increasingly concerned about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses; He said he thought it had risen to the levels he experienced as a child and young adult before the founding of Israel. Inside A video interview with the Jewish News Syndicate in January 2023He said Jews who donate to universities, which he said teach their students to hate Judaism and Israel, are “not the brightest people in the world.” Conversely, he said, he is careful to impart his values ​​in ways that advance them.

“We’re very careful about giving. And we’ve given over $2 billion in the last few years, and we track that very carefully where we give,” he said. “We keep a check. We make sure the money is spent the way it should be spent.”

Marcus is survived by his wife and stepson; his children from his first marriage; and for his grandchildren, to whom he says his 2022 book, “Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking, Give Back, and Doing It Yourself,” is aimed.

“I couldn’t be the world’s greatest grandfather because I was too busy doing too many things,” he said in the JNS interview. “I wanted them to know everything I did.”