From the streets of The Bronx to the heights of Wall Street, Paul Bernstein talks about his eventful life, his connection to Norman Gershman, his support for humanitarian causes, and the importance of recognizing the Jewish rescue in Albania during Holocaust

Paul Bernstein has been a legend in Wall Street, long before Wall Street got both fame and notoriety by the entertainment industry. It is somehow symbolic that he retired early, in 1986, one year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street opened in theaters everywhere, with an unforgettable Michael Douglas as the main cast.
The “street boy” from The Bronx, who failed most aptitude tests and was predicted to fail in all the endeavors he favored, was at some point managing 80 billion dollars in assets in the company he started from scratch with his brother.
Paul Bernstein brought almost all clients and became known as the best salesman in New York City.
Yet, it is the work that he has done during his “retirement” that will be his greatest legacy. It is this work that eventually connected him to the Albanian-American community and that led to our meeting this month in his glorious apartment in Sutton Place, in Manhattan.

Besa and the Jewish rescue in World War II

It all began, one day, when Paul met a former fraternity brother of his, whom he knew well. His name: Norman Gershman. He was traveling to a place in Europe called Albania to take photographs of people who had saved Jews during World War II.
“Do you want to come with me?” Norman had asked but Paul, while curious about the story and the country, declined to join him. Yet, they kept in touch.
The more Paul learned about the story of the Jewish rescue in Albania during Holocaust the more he wanted to help.
“As far as we know, not one Jew was captured in Albania, during WWII. Albania was the only country in Europe, where the number of Jews was greater at the end of the war”, Bernstein says.
So, when Norman was struggling with finding support for his book and the film project, Paul Bernstein got involved. In the process, he met many Albanians, some of whom became lifelong friends.
He mentions Mit’hat Gashi, Majlinda Myrto, and many others who were involved and have been vocal in helping these projects and have promoted the exemplary role Albanians played during one of the darkest chapters of world history.
It was through the help of Mit’hat Gashi that the producer of the film was awarded more than half-a-million Dollars in a grant from the US government. When that was not enough, Paul Bernstein intervened with a donation of his own.
“Mr. Bernstein has donated money, time, and he has actively shared with people in his network the story that Albanians played in rescuing Jews,” Mit’hat Gashi wrote to me, when I asked about his connection to the philanthropist. “Through his work –whether passing on written material (books, articles, etc) or inviting friends to watch the documentary film– Paul has increased the positive publicity on Albania, while corrupt politicians in Albania do the opposite.”
The name of Paul Bernstein, together with the Seeds of Peace foundation, is mentioned among the short list of donors in BESA, the book where you can find the best photos that Gershman took during his trips to Albania, featuring some of the people who were involved in rescuing the Jews during WWII or their descendants. Gershman was not only a dedicated researcher, but also a great photographer.
Besa is a code of honor which has been for centuries in the backbone of the Albanian culture and derives from Kanun, a code of non-state, traditional laws, transmitted orally from generation to generation. It upholds hospitality and kindness to strangers and houseguests and responsibility for their safety. It played a role in saving the Jews under Fascist and Nazi occupations in Albania, Kosova, and wherever Albanians lived in the Balkans.
The book and then the film focus mostly in Muslim Albanians, which has helped the promotion of the book but remains a point of controversy among Albanians. The phenomenon of Besa predates the arrival of Islam and of the Ottoman empire in the region and is commonly found among Albanians of all faiths. Accordingly, people of all religious affiliations, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians were involved in saving the Jews in Albania during WWII.
Albanians have lived for centuries in a multi-religious society and are proud of their inter-religious harmony. This context makes their defense of their Jewish neighbors and migrants more understandable.
Bernstein was fascinated by this story and has remained to this day a great promoter of it.
Even before WWII, King Zog had supplied Jews from all over Europe with passports so they could escape to the United States.
He met with the King’s grandson when he traveled to New York.
Paul has been to Albania too. This came during a cruise trip with his wife Peggy, during which they stopped in Durres, Albania and from there, with a few Albanian friends they traveled to Tirana. They were left with the best impression of the country. In Tirana, they met with the President Bujar Nishani, as the local Jewish community celebrated Hanukkah.
“Tirana was a beautiful place and people were very nice”, Paul said.
He met the President also here in New York, when they screened the movie Besa at the JCC on the West Side, where the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation paid tribute to the Albanian rescuers. President Nishani accepted the medal on their behalf.
We had the pleasure of meeting him in person, in his glorious apartment, with unbelievable panoramic views, where he lives with his wife Peggy. Together with the publisher of Illyria newspaper, Vehbi Bajrami, we were introduced to Paul through Skender Ghilaga, an Albanian-American engineer and developer of major projects in the US and overseas. Skender is the founder of the New York-based Albanian American Chamber of Commerce and has been involved in countless business, humanitarian, and political community initiatives over the years.
Vehbi has described the life story of Skender Ghilaga in his Shqiptarët e Amerikës (The Albanians of America), a voluminous and rich collection of personal histories from our community. The two are old friends and it was Skender who called him one day to speak about Paul Bernstein and his Albanian connection.
Skender and Paul met through his niece Artes Ghilaga who is Paul’s Yoga instructor and have bonded over some mean backgammon afternoon games and are great raconteurs of old New York stories, a treasure trove for those interested in the City’s history from politics to real estate, from culture icons to sport major moments.
Our meeting however was mostly dedicated to the Albanian history and Paul Bernstein’s work in humanitarian causes.

The boys from The Bronx dominate Wall Street

Paul regaled us with stories of how he grew up in South Bronx and later on Sheridan Avenue near Grand Concourse, when his father began to do well in the jewelry business.
He went to William Howard Taft School and was a professional baseball player in the Minor League, with the Atlanta Braves, who don’t exist anymore. In his time they were known as Milwaukee Braves at some point.
Paul joined the Army and could have ended up in Korea if it wasn’t for his success in a typing and short hand school at Fort Benjamin Harrison.
He would have favored to become a veterinarian rather than an accountant, but in the end his greatest professional success would be as a salesman in Wall Street.
From Dreyfus Funds to Oppenheimer Holdings after Dreyfus to starting a company with his brother Zalman, Paul followed his potential and was rewarded for it. Their firm, Sanford Bernstein was revolutionary for their time. Their focus on research was unprecedented and they accepted only discretionary accounts and based investment decisions on a dividend discount model, as an obituary of his brother describes the unexpected success of their startup.
They were told this was a failed and vilified model that would never work, because of past abuses on Wall Street. No one would want to be with them. But, soon “everyone” wanted to be with them, as the firm kept growing. Described as a “great salesman”, Paul brought almost all the clients.
“I had a very successful professional life”, Paul says. “At one point, we were managing 80 billion dollars in assets. Individuals. No hedge funds or anything. We started with 25,000 minimum. I was the top salesman, sales manager, and also ran the audit room. Not bad for a guy who was told by an aptitude test: “don’t become a salesman.”
Paul mulled the idea of a tell-all autobiography but then dropped the project when some of the former colleagues who joined him and his brother in the new firm, Shepard D. Osherow, Roger Hertog, Lewis A. Sanders, and Shelly Lawrence declined to be interviewed on record.
It’s all in the past now. “I retired early, because to me Wall Street is the most crooked game in the world. I didn’t enjoy it. We got involved. We made our mark and now I enjoy my time.”

Humanitarian work, his legacy

Paul Bernstein has always been interested in humanitarian causes. He got the first taste early on with his involvement with HIAS – a relief organization for Jewish immigrants, which helped them with a simple job and a place to leave, when they arrived here.
In 1962, his work took another direction, when he met Fred Stein, whom he knew well from another firm and who spoke to him about an organization called Concerned Citizens for Soviet Jewry.
There was an opportunity to help the so-called “refuseniks”, Jewish people from the Soviet Union who wanted to leave the country. The work with them began in the 60s and continued all the way to the 80s. Many of them were fired from their jobs and couldn’t go back to school, because of their efforts to leave USSR.
With Fred Stein’s encouragement Paul helped to connect HIAS with Concerned Citizens for Soviet Jewry. Among those he tried to help was also the sister of Norman Gershman, his fraternity brother, who lived in Moscow. He even traveled there to meet her in Russia.
In his philanthropic activities, Paul has supported Seeing Eye and K-9 Companions over the years.
In a memorable episode from his life as a philanthropist, Paul offered a donation of 600,000 to the Children of Chernobyl charity and as a thank-you gesture was given a walk-on-role in what would become soon a very popular film at the time, Serendipity.
As they were filming near the famous Plaza Hotel, Paul was supposed to walk side-by side with the film’s main actor John Cusack. The scene was very simple, but they had to film it six times. As soon as they started, someone passed by calling on Bernstein, “Hey Paul, how the heck are you?” (The wording has been changed a bit here to accommodate it to the sensitivities of Illyria’s readership).
It was 1989, Paul frequented the place often and it was unavoidable. After they were interrupted by a fifth person asking Paul, “how the heck are you?”, Cussack lost his nerve and turned to Paul, who was supposed to be just a cameo character on his side and asked: “Excuse me but who the heck are you?”
“Well,” Paul responded, “it seems that everyone who passes by knows who the heck I am. So, the real question is who the heck are you?”
No wonder the part made the cut when the film was finished.
The last brochure of Tour for Tolerance praises both him and his wife Peggy for their generosity. Paul’s collaboration with TFT began after a casual introduction in an elevator in Maddison Square Garden with Bill Tingling, President and founder of Tour for Tolerance. His initiative aims at teaching tolerance and historic awareness to high school students in New York and all over America. A special attention it is paid to Holocaust. By using buses, ads and community resources, TFT turns these vehicles as traveling museums stopping at schools nation-wide, to promote empathy, compassion, tolerance, inclusion etc.
“The ignorance of younger generations for tragedies like Holocaust is at the root of many bad things we see in our days”, Paul Bernstein.
In the 1990s, he joined the Seeds for Peace, which had begun by brining Israeli and Palestinian, Egyptian, Indian e Pakistani children together for summer camps in US.
In a good example of his dedication, on November 2008, Seeds for Peace praised the “incredible show of support”, by Paul Bernstein who had “agreed to match the American Seeds fundraising efforts, dollar for dollar”.
It was via Seeds for Peace that Bernstein secured funds for BESA.
Paul believes that unearthing the story of the Jewish rescues and the promotion of the Besa project have put Albania on the map: “This is a remarkable story and the world should know all about it”. In his view Holocaust should be remembered for the great tragedy that it was, but also for all those who rose to the occasion to help and rescue those in danger.
“Today, in a time of rising anti-semitism and intolerance,” Paul says, “it is even more important to remember and celebrate what Albanians did and find inspiration in it.”/ylliria press/

From the left, Skënder Ghilaga, Pauk Bernstein abd Vehbi Bajrami, during our visit at Paul’s apartment.

Paul Bernstein, with his wife Peggy.

A citation by the President of the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City, Eric Adams to recognize “the strong philanthropic” of Paul Bernstein over the years and his particular support for the Tour For Tolerance and other non-for-profit organizations.

One of spectacular views from the apartment of Paul Bernstein, in Manhattan.

A conversation among friends.