After a fire destroyed his factory in Massachusetts in 1995, he continued to pay employees and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on reconstruction.

Give any friend a story

As a subscriber, you can give away 10 gift articles every month. Anyone can read what you share.

Massachusetts industrialist Aaron Feuerstein became a national hero in 1995, when he refused to fire his textile factory workers after a catastrophic fire, and then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the factory, on Thursday Died in a hospital in Boston. He is 95 years old.

His granddaughter and part of his caregiver Aeffia Feuerstein said the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Feuerstein's company, Malden Mills, was one of the last large textile companies in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s, and its manufacturing employment fell from 225,000 in the 1980s to approximately 25,000 a decade later.

Most other companies face competition from low-wage countries and cheap imports, and either shut down or move production out of the state.

Malden Mills, located outside the Old Mill City of Lawrence, is a brilliant exception: Mr. Feuerstein not only refused to move, but because his proprietary fabric Polartec sold it to clothing brands such as Patagonia, he and his company prospered and LL beans. In fact, 1995 was a landmark year for the company, with sales increasing by 10% to more than $400 million.

Then, on the night of December 11, 1995, a boiler in one of the five huge factories exploded. The shock wave destroyed the most advanced sprinkler system that Mr. Feuerstein had just installed, and the 45-mile-per-hour wind blew the ensuing fire to three other buildings. The fire burned for 16 hours and injured more than 30 workers.

Three days later, most of the 1,400 workers in the factory lined up to receive wages, which they thought might be the last wage they received from Malden Mills. Mr. Feuerstein joined them. He handed out a holiday bonus, and then announced a bigger gift: he would immediately reopen as many factories as he could, replace his lost buildings, and continue to pay idle workers a month’s wages—and later he would reopen as much as possible. This commitment was extended for the second time.

A week later, he and his workers worked non-stop to put the surviving building, the finishing plant, back into operation. Mr. Feuerstein bought an empty factory nearby to store new equipment. By the first few weeks of January, hundreds of his employees had returned to work. Only 20 months later, he opened a new complex with a value of US$130 million.

A fitness madman who wakes up at 5:30 every morning for jogging, reading scriptures and reciting poems, Mr. Feuerstein quoted EE Cummings' quotations to announce the reopening.

"I thank you, God, on this amazing day," he said, "I am dead, and I live again today."

Mr. Fairstein is a wealthy industrialist, but he is far from Dickensian stereotypes. He ate with his workers in the cafeteria and provided them with interest-free loans to go to school.

"They all call him Mr. AF," his son Raphael said in a telephone interview. "If someone feels that they have been treated unfairly, his office door is always open."

During the wave of deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s, when private equity acquisitions and wage competition caused the loss of millions of jobs in high-income states such as Massachusetts, Mr. Fairstein’s commitment to Lawrence and his employees was even more noteworthy .

He told the New York Times in 1996: "I think I am a symbol of the campaign against layoffs and layoffs, and the answer will eventually be produced. People think I am a turning point in the trend."

The fire and his bootstrap response made Mr. Feuerstein a celebrity. The Boston Globe referred to him as the "Malden Mills Man". In his 1996 State of the Union speech, he sat next to Hillary Clinton. In the speech, President Bill Clinton declared: "The era of big government is over."

He has won dozens of citizenship awards and honorary degrees, and he has used his platform to condemn companies that refuse to prioritize employee interests.

In 1996, he said in a conversation in Amherst, Massachusetts: "The basic idea that you cannot serve the interests of shareholders and workers at the same time is foreign to me. Their interests are the same."

However, good deeds will not go unpunished, and Mr. Feuerstein's reconstruction work left Malden Mills heavily in debt, even though Polartec's sales soared in the late 1990s. The company went bankrupt in 2001; two years later, it presented a restructuring plan that stripped Mr. Feuerstein of his management position. His attempt to buy back the company was rejected by the new board, and he left in 2004.

"I am one of the few people who fight to keep their jobs. This is really a very difficult and failed battle," he told the Globe in 2015. "I ended up being one of the victims."

Aaron Mordechai Feuerstein was born in Boston on December 11, 1925. His grandfather Henry Feuerstein founded Malden Mills in 1907, and later his father Samuel took over it. His mother Miriam (Landau) Feuerstein is a housewife.

His first wife, Merika, died in 1984, and his second wife, Louise, died in 2013. His sister Juliet Congold; and six grandchildren.

He studied at Boston Latin School and Yeshiva University, where he studied English and philosophy. He joined Malden Mills immediately after graduating in 1947. The company that produced upholstery and other textiles before developing Polartec moved to the Lawrence factory in the 1950s.

Mr. Feuerstein's father established the Youth Israel Synagogue in Brookline, Massachusetts, where his family lives. Just over a year before the Malden Mills fire, an electrical short circuit in the synagogue caused a fire that destroyed most of the buildings. Mr. Feuerstein donated $1 million to rebuild it.

After Mr. Fairstein left, Malden Mills did not live long. The new owners moved Polartec's production to New Hampshire and Tennessee in the late 2000s, and in December 2015-on the eve of the 20th week of the fire-announced that the factory would be closed at the end of the year.

Today, there are several small businesses in this building, including a brewery, a hydroponic farm, and a 3D printing facility.