Sylvia Hassenfeld

From 1988 to 1992, Mrs. Hassenfeld was the first female president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief group founded in 1914 to provide social services and refugee assistance for persecuted Jews around the world. Mrs. Hassenfeld was the widow of Merrill L. Hassenfeld, who ran Hasbro — founded in 1923 by Mr. Hassenfeld’s father, Henry, and his uncles Hillel and Herman — in the ’50s and ’60s. Their son Stephen took over the company after Merrill Hassenfeld’s death in 1979. It was the world’s fifth-largest toy company at the time, but had become the largest by the time he died in 1989. Another son, Alan, led Hasbro, which is still under the family’s control, until 2008. While she served for many years as a member of the board and was involved, as the mother of three children, in the early test-marketing of many Hasbro products, Mrs. Hassenfeld was mainly occupied by philanthropic work, her daughter said. She served as national chairwoman of the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal and vice chairwoman of the Jerusalem Foundation. She also had leadership roles in national and international Jewish organizations like the United Israel Appeal and the Jewish Agency for Israel. After her son Stephen’s death, she took a leadership role in the Hasbro Children’s Foundation, a nonsectarian humanitarian organization that he founded in 1984 to help poor and homeless children, and was instrumental in creating the Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at N.Y.U. Medical Center. In a separate campaign, she donated $50 million toward development of a children’s hospital at the medical center, now known as NYU Langone, to be named the Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital. It is scheduled to open in 2017. Besides her daughter, Ellen Hassenfeld Block, and her son, Alan, Mrs. Hassenfeld is survived by three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.