Philanthropist and civil servant Thaddeus “Tad” Taube passed away on September 13, 2025 at the age of 94, at his home in San Mateo County, California. Born in Kraków in 1931, he left Poland with his family before the outbreak of World War II, and dedicated his life and philanthropy to furthering the Polish-Jewish dialogue across Poland, Israel and the United States.
In addition to his many visionary enterprises—including serving as founder and president of Taube Philanthropies (San Francisco), founder and benefactor of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw), and patron of the Tadeusz Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław, among others—Tad and his wife Dianne were also the patrons and founders of the Dianne and Tad Taube Polish Music Center Digital Archives, based at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. The Taube family’s deep knowledge of the Polish-Jewish community of musicians and intellectuals in Los Angeles during the post-war years connected them to several PMC archival collections, which served in 2019 as inspiration for Dianne and Tad’s extremely generous transformative gift to preserve these collections through digitization.
For Tad, helping others was never a choice – it was a calling shaped by his own story of survival, made possible through the compassion of others. That recognition became the enduring principle behind his life’s work. A refugee from Poland who became a pioneering entrepreneur, civic leader, and philanthropist, Tad transformed personal success into a lifelong mission of generosity, advancing education, strengthening civic and cultural institutions, and enriching Jewish life across the United States, Israel, and Poland.
-from a statement written by Dianne Taube and longtime collaborator Shana Penn
Tad Taube was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 2004 for his dedication to philanthropy and furthering of Polish-Jewish relations, and went on to serve as the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland in California for almost two decades.
For more dedications to Tad Taube upon his passing, please visit the Koret Foundation, tvn24.pl, and the POLIN Museum.
[Source: taubephilanthropies.org]