HELENE KAPLAN

1933 - 2023

KAPLAN--Helene. Helene Kaplan passed away peacefully at home with her family on January 26 at the age of 89. The family is deeply grateful to the wonderful people who cared for her with warmth and love through the last years of her life. Helene was born on June 19, 1933, in Brooklyn, NY. From the time she was a little girl, Helene knew she wanted to be a citizen of the world, well before women were welcomed into those ranks. She was a quiet trailblazer, a brilliant and warm woman who was determined to help those around her grow and flourish. Helene joined the freshman class at her beloved Barnard College at age 16, where she met her partner for life, Mark Kaplan, at the first dance of her freshman year. Their deep love for each other created a wonderful lifelong partnership and a loving family. After graduating from college, while a young mother, she founded an art business, was the youngest chair of a branch of the League of Women Voters, and then, determined to become a lawyer and encouraged by her husband, graduated from NYU law school. From there, she developed a significant legal career ultimately of counsel at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, where she retired in 2014. Helene had an extraordinary career as a legal adviser, director or trustee of a range of prominent institutions and foundations including the American Museum of Natural History, Barnard College, the Bretton Woods Committee, the Commonwealth Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the New York City Public Development Corporation and New York Council for the Humanities. She was the first trustee to serve a second term as chair of the board of Carnegie Corporation of New York and its first chair to be elected an honorary trustee. She was among the first group of women to be admitted to the Century Association. Helene was also a board director of some of the largest corporations in the world including Bell Atlantic, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, May Department Stores, MetLife, and Verizon Communications. She had a distinguished record of public service, traveling to South Africa several times as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on South Africa, serving on the New York State Taskforce on Life and the Law, and co-authoring a seminal report on the use of science in judicial proceedings. Helene won numerous awards for public service. In 1992, she received Barnard College's Distinguished Alumna Award and, in 1993, its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. She also received an honorary doctorate of laws from Columbia University and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she served as chair. Helene accomplished all this while loving, supporting and inspiring her husband Mark and her daughters Marjorie and Sue, and then extending that love to their spouses, Gustav and David, amplifying it with her grandchildren, Rachel, Jacob, Nathan and Kaleb, and then embracing their spouses and partners. The family is celebrating her life privately at this time and will advise of any memorial plans in the future.