Gary Beren, former owner of the family scrap metal business where he’d worked in his teens, who became a leader in Jewish community organizations, died Sunday at home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 89.
He learned in spring, 2021, that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, his son, Joel Beren, said.
He and his wife, Nancy, moved from Springfield Township to Florida in 2003, about five years after he and his son sold their business, A. Edelstein & Son, to OmniSource Corp.
In high school he’d worked for his uncles Abe and Harry Levine at Edelstein, a Lagrange Street scrap metal business founded decades earlier. He made his career there after stints at the University of Toledo and Ohio State University and stateside Army service.
He drove trucks and operated cranes. He dealt with customers, buying metal from peddlers and tradesmen and from Boy Scouts who held scrap drives.
“There was no task too dirty, too hard to do. He ingrained that in me as well,” said the younger Mr. Beren, former owner of Cherry Picked Auto Parts, who worked with his father for more than 20 years. “He really gave me free rein from the time I came there full time to grow and build the business as I pleased.”
Thomas Tuschman, a onetime competitor whose firm bought the Berens’ business, recalled Mr. Beren as a friend and mentor, “an ultimate gentleman.”
“Gary was very astute. He knew the metal business,” said Mr. Tuschman, executive vice president of OmniSource, now a subsidiary of Steel Dynamics Inc. “He was a pillar in the Jewish community, and so is Joel.”
He was a past president of the Jewish Community Center and served on the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo, of which his son is a past president. He was a member of Congregation Etz Chayim, The Temple-Congregation Shomer Emunim, and Congregation B’nai Israel.
“He made friends easily,” the younger Mr. Beren said. “He never forgot a face. Wherever he was, in Toledo or Florida or Detroit, he was able to thread the needle and come up with a common experience, a common person they knew.”
He was born May 8, 1933, in Detroit to Betty Levine Beren and Joseph Beren. The family lived for a time in Flint, Mich., but after his father’s 1941 death, moved to Toledo, where his mother’s family lived. He was a 1951 graduate of Scott High School, where he played tennis.
Surviving are his wife, the former Nancy Steinberg, whom he married in 1975; son, Joel Beren; daughter, Debbie Diamond; stepsons, Mark Fetterman and Jeffrey Fetterman; brother, Charles Beren; six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Funeral services will begin at 1 p.m. Thursday at Congregation B'nai Israel in Sylvania Township, where the family will greet friends from 4:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday. Arrangements are by the Robert H. Wick/Wisniewski Funeral Home.
The family suggests tributes to Hillel at UT via toledohillel.org or in care of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo.
First Published November 17, 2022, 5:00 a.m.
