Nathan Philip Shafran

Nathan Philip “Nate” Shafran, 86, Vice Chairman and Executive Vice President of Forest City Enterprises and the company’s longest-serving employee, passed away at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital on Sunday, February 20, 2000, following a brief illness.

Mr. Shafran was born in Detroit to Joseph and Mary Shafran, the second of the couple’s three children. He moved to Cleveland in the 1920s and graduated from Cleveland’s Glenville High School in 1933. He sold hair products before he married Fannye Ratner in 1939. He then joined her in the family’s business, then known as Forest City Materials Co.

He began his career in Forest City Enterprises' day-to-day lumber and building supply operations and eventually oversaw the company's extensive millwork assembly plant on Cleveland’s West Side. In the 1970s, Mr. Shafran led a Forest City project team that developed a winning entry to a competition held by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The company’s proposal for a system to prefabricate the components of apartment towers at a plant in Akron, Ohio, and assemble them on-site, made the company a leading developer of federally-subsidized housing, and helped position Forest City as a national force in large-scale real estate development.

Extremely active in charitable and volunteer organizations, particularly Jewish causes, Mr. Shafran founded the State of Israel Bonds organization in Cleveland, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the Solomon Schlechter Jewish Day School in Cleveland Heights. Mr. Shafran served on the boards of Suburban Hospital, B’nai B'rith Hillel, Park Synagogue, and Red Feather, a forerunner of the United Way. He served as President of Park Synagogue from 1977 to 1981 and was a member of the congregation’s Building Committee when it constructed its landmark building in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, designed by the famed Modernist architect Eric Mendelsohn. Mr. Shafran chaired the Cleveland Community for the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Eternal Light, the seminary’s television broadcast, and he also helped found the Solomon Schecter Day School of Cleveland and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He and his family helped underwrite the creation of a state-of-the-art replacement for an aging star-watching chamber of the planetarium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which will be called the Nathan and Fannye Planetarium.

Through his work with Forest City’s unionized labor force, Mr. Shafran became involved in the activities of Teamsters Local 131 and served as a trustee of the Teamsters Pension Fund. His work on federally-subsidized senior citizens housing projects led to his ongoing concern with the lives of older adults. For a time, senior citizens in Shaker Heights, Ohio, were chauffeured to errands in a full-sized London taxicab that Mr. Shafran leased to the city (where he resided for 25 years) for $1 a year. He was named Man of the Year by the Cleveland Men’s Organization for Rehabilitation through Training in 1976.

A garrulous and outgoing personality, Mr. Shafran was noted for his joking manner and an encyclopedic memory for humorous stories. Most Saturdays he greeted numbers of friends and well-wishers from his regular seat at the rear edge of Park Synagogue’s Main Sanctuary. In recent years, on the Sabbath he sported a silk Moroccan yarmulke with embroidery and mirrors that lent him a vaguely regal air appropriate to his status as the synagogue’s most visible senior member.

Mr. Shafran is predeceased by his sister, Ann Schwartz.

He is survived by his wife, Fannye Shafran (nee Ratner); his daughters, Joan Shafran (Rob Haimes) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paula Krulak of Manhattan, New York; his son, Joseph (Marla) Shafran, of University Heights; his younger sister, Faye Chase; his grandchildren, Roger (Francine) Krulak, Robert and Lora Krulak, Ilana, Eric, and David Shafran; and his great-grandchild, Julian.