He lived in a trailer – and bequeathed $2 million toward the cause of social justice

By Andrew Adler
Community Editor

Death was tugging at Marvin Benjamin on November 19, 1998, as the Jewish proprietor of the Melody Music Shop in Elizabethtown, Kentucky affixed his signature to what was to be his final will.  

 He and his late wife, Joyce, had pursued a life of conspicuous frugality – days were spent attending to customers in their modest storefront. Home was a trailer.  

So nobody expected much when it came time to read Benjamin’s final testament. But when it was unsealed and its provisions examined, the document revealed a rather stunning bequest: nearly $2 million, to be devoted to the cause of “fighting hatred, bigotry and antisemitism” as the Marvin and Joyce Benjamin Fund.  

Initially held by the Community Foundation of Louisville, the assets were later transferred to what became the Central Kentucky Community Foundation, which continues to administer the holdings and guide its grant-making process.  

“Mr. Benjamin obviously had a very personal reason for the words he chose,” says Davette Swiney, the CKCF’s president and CEO. Sadly, “I did not have the benefit of getting to know him,” she lamented. “And man, every day that I deal with this fund I wish I had.”  

Whatever backstory to the Benjamins exists is, at best, incomplete.  

The couple had met in Chicago before getting married in Louisville in June of 1958 – he was Jewish; she was Catholic — moving to Elizabethtown not long afterward for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery. Childless, their lives – if not reclusive – were decidedly unassuming.  

Community foundations, which typically manage an array of smaller funds that can be combined to leverage value, are not accustomed to seven-figure bequests falling into their laps. It’s usually quite the opposite.  

“It’s always my desire that if someone’s thinking of legacy gifts, we’re able to have that conversation on the front end,” Swiney says. “We’re glad for them to include whatever they want in their will, but that’s generally going to be some pretty basic language.”  

But if “we can have a conversation, we can better carry out what they want,” Swiney explains. “We can always ask a living donor, ‘Okay, things are changing,’ or ‘This is what’s going on – what do you think?’ We can bring those scenarios and get feedback, but we can’t do that when something comes out of a will.”  

Call the Benjamin Fund a sterling example of “It is what it is.” The foundation’s staff and advisory committee, which decides which grant applications will be approved, can only infer in approximate terms what Marvin Benjamin desired.  

“We always say that our obligation to honor donor intent, to carry out what people want, prevails over anything else that we do,” Swiney emphasizes. “But I probably feel an extra level of responsibility for people who are no longer with us. We’re the protector of their mission.”  

In such cases – Benjamin’s included – the foundation scours the landscape for any clues that might reflect the donor’s wishes. Here, though, clues were scarce.  

“They were loners who weren’t significantly engaged in community life,” Swiney said of the couple. “They had their store, which was somewhat successful, but not a majorly lucrative business. I don’t think they spent much money. This is where I get into speculation. It would make one wonder what kind of experiences they may have had, experiences that led them to feel compelled to dedicate that significant amount of money.”  

To be sure, there were precious few Jews in Elizabethtown in those days. And the fact that a Jewish man had married a Catholic woman, living in a predominantly Protestant environment, might have led to socially awkward circumstances. We may never know the specifics of their life in central Kentucky.  

What we do know, however, is that Marvin Benjamin had strong feelings about the need to combat hatred and religious bigotry. Fast forward to today, and those needs may never have been greater.

“We don’t have a Jewish population in E-Town, or in our region,” says Julia Springsteen, who acts as the principal coordinator for the Benjamin Fund. “But frankly, hate is hate, and discrimination is discrimination.  

In recent years, Benjamin Fund dollars have support such efforts as a Holocaust Mural display, and Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana’s “My Sisters Keeper” program, designed “to encourage girls to understand and celebrate differences amongst each other.”  

Another project involved a partnership between the Jewish Federation of the Bluegrass and the University of Kentucky to support the Jewish Holocaust Education Initiative. Elsewhere, Holocaust survivor Alice Dreifuss Goldstein spoke about her family’s escape from Nazi Germany.  

“We hope people can draw correlations between what she and her family went through and what people are saying about immigrants or people of color right now,” Springsteen says.  

Similarly, institutions like Russellville, Kentucky’s Seek Museum — which has employed film to document slavery and “struggles for freedom, equality and justice” have benefitted from Benjamin Fund support.  

“We brought in the director of the Seek Museum and made the documentary available to attendees in advance,” Springsteen says. It was an example of “people doing this really hard work and creating these from-the-ground-up experiences.”  

Currently the Benjamin Fund’s original $2 million has grown to around $2.5 million — “the last time I looked,” Swiney says.  

With sufficient care, the Marvin and Joyce Benjamin Fund will enjoy a long and healthy lifespan. “We work with people who want to do a variety of things, and some of them have more long-term legs, more forever legs, than others,” Swiney observes.  

“It’s hard to think broadly, and when you’re thinking about forever, you have to do that. Shifting that mindset is hard, but it’s important. I don’t know if it was intentional by Mr. Benjamin and his choice of words — but carrying out the mission of the fund makes me think it will work forever.”