Sol Rosenberg

Who was Sol Rosenberg?

Sol Rosenberg was a Polish-born American businessman and philanthropist. He was a Jewish survivor of the German Nazi death and concentration camps who became an industrialist and philanthropist in Monroe in northeastern Louisiana.

After the German invasion of Poland of 1939 Rosenberg lived in the Warsaw Ghetto set up by the Nazi occupiers of Poland. The German Nazi regime sent his parents and two sisters to their deaths in 1942, but Rosenberg was one of the very few to escape from the death camp at Treblinka; he returned to Warsaw, where he participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Rosenberg was then sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was liberated by the Allied Powers after the final overthrow of the Nazi regime.

In Poland, Rosenberg met his wife, the former Tola Baron. The couple emigrated to Louisiana in 1949 and thereafter settled in Monroe were they started Sol's Pipe and Steel Co. from scratch.

Rosenberg was involved in community affairs and charitable works, being a charter founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Holocaust Museum Houston. He was a member of the Monroe Chamber of Commerce and supported the Booster Club at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. In 2006, he was awarded the Kitty DeGree Lifetime Business Achievement Award. He played golf at the Bayou Desiard Country Club in Monroe, where he made a hole in one at the age of eighty-one.