In 1892 Isaac Cooper and his wife's brother, Louis Levy, formed a partnership and established the firm of Cooper & Levy, a retail and mail order grocery, hardware, and woodenware business. They supplied most of the prospectors during the Alaska-Klondike gold rush and acquired a considerable fortune by the time they sold out ten years later to the Bon Marché department store.
In the same year, 1892, Esther Levy and her daughter, Lizzie Levy Cooper, organized Seattle's first Jewish welfare society, the Ladies' Hebrew Benevolent Society, to provide aid to needy families. Esther Levy became its first president, serving until 1900. Lizzie Levy Cooper was president from 1900 to1915. She was also president of the Seattle Council of Jewish Women, 1903-1906; vice president of the state council during the same period; and president of the Ladies Auxiliary to Temple De Hirsch, 1913-1914. She died in 1915.
Two of Lizzie Levy Cooper's brothers, Aubrey Levy, a lawyer, and Eugene Levy, a motion picture theater promoter, in partnership with Isaac Cooper (Lizzie Levy Cooper's husband) formed the Republic Operating Company and in 1927 built the Republic Building at Third Avenue and Pike Street. All of the income from this building was willed in 1945 and 1959 to three service organizations: the Jewish Welfare Society, the Caroline Kline Galland Home for the Aged, and the Seattle Children's Orthopedic Hospital of Seattle.
From the guide to the Cooper and Levy families papers, 1890-1959, (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections)
