Philanthropist Anne Tanenbaum died peacefully at home last week. She was 99.

Recipients of her generosity included the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT), which is now known as the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto; Baycrest; Mount Sinai Hospital; the Art Gallery of Ontario; York University; the University of Toronto; Shaare Tzedek Hospital, the Canadian Opera Company, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

Tanenbaum endowed six chairs for research into neuroscience and molecular medicine – two at U of T’s faculty of medicine, as well as others at Baycrest, the Hospital for Sick Children, Mount Sinai, and Toronto General Hospital. She also supported projects at Mount Sinai and North York General hospitals in digital mammography and breast cancer care.

She received honorary doctorates from U of T and BGU. In 1995, she received the Outstanding Philanthropist Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Greater Toronto chapter.

Tanenbaum was “a visionary in health care who understood the importance of research and its ability to affect the lives of people around the world,” said Mark Gryfe, Baycrest Foundation president.

“The two research chairs in cognitive neuroscience at Baycrest, established in her and her husband’s names, helped catapult research at Baycrest to extraordinary levels,” Gryfe said.

“Equally important is the powerful legacy of philanthropy carried on by her children.”

Paul Shaviv, TanenbaumCHAT’s director of education, said that multi-million dollar gifts to the school from Tanenbaum and her late husband Max helped fund extensive additions to its Wilmington campus and constituted the main donation for the school’s new Vaughan campus. As well, he added, the gifts made TanenbaumCHAT “a destination for educational philanthropy on a major scale.”

Tanenbaum’s “smile at seeing the students was memorable. A family member once told me that her gifts to TanenbaumCHAT gave her the  most pleasure of all of her major philanthropies,” Shaviv said.

“They were visionary gifts, made by a remarkable personality, and they were directed to the welfare of the very heart of the Jewish community – its young people.”

Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, senior rabbi at Beth Tzedec Congregation, described her as “warm, gracious, elegant, and caring, a loyal and devoted Jew whose family taught her the importance of Torah, mitzvot, chesed and tzedakah.”

Tanenbaum’s daughter, Tauba Spiro, recalled that in the early 1990s, she and her husband, Sol Spiro, ran the Max Tanenbaum music program at Princess Margaret Hospital every Wednesday. Every week, her mother “came and sat in the front row. She couldn’t go anymore to the symphony or concerts, which she loved to do, so she really enjoyed this.”

The New York-born Tanenbaum’s early life was not easy, Spiro said.

Her mother died when she was only six, and she helped care for her siblings, and later her step-siblings. She began working at age eight.

The family eventually moved to Toronto, where she met Max Tanenbaum. They married in February 1930. Max Tanenbaum later amassed a fortune in steel fabrication and real estate. He died in 1983.

“They were an incredible team,” Spiro said. “They set a high example of generosity and sharing. Our home was open to anyone who needed [a venue for fundraising] – Mizrachi, Israel Bonds, United Jewish Appeal, her Scopus chapter of Hadassah.”

The couple were among the first to invest in orange groves in Israel, and the family still owns one near Kfar Saba, Spiro said.

Long before it was fashionable, and even before she herself visited Israel, she encouraged Spiro to spend a summer there when she was only 17.

Spiro praised her mother for being one of the first women to give to the United Jewish Appeal independently from her husband.

Friday night and Shabbat were especially important to Tanenbaum, Spiro said.

“She thrived on it – the shopping, the cooking, the baking. Friday night was the most special dinner of the week.”

Tanenbaum was predeceased by her husband Max, her son Harold, and siblings Jack Wolf, Molly Rafael, Dorothy Roher and Esther Carmen. She is survived by children Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, Minda and Les Feldman, Tauba and Sol Spiro, Howard and Carole Tanenbaum, Larry and Judy Tanenbaum, Carol and Jeannie Tanenbaum, brothers Bill and Noah Wolf, 22 grandchildren and 43 great-grandchildren.