 He was a philanthropist who helped establish the nationwide United Jewish Appeal in 1939 and made other charitable grants through the William Rosenwald Family Fund.His father was Julius Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company and a leading philanthropist whose Rosenwald Fund built 5,000 schools for black children in the South a few decades after the Civil War.William Rosenwald was born in Wilmette, Illinois in 1903, he was the second son of Julius Rosenwald and the former Augusta Nusbaum.