When Anna Kurzweil died, she was a respected member of her community having served for 25 years as a teacher and a regular participant in many charitable functions. But she was also living with a secret, the fact that she was a multimillionaire. The unprepossessing old woman had managed to scrape together the next egg from years of simple living and wise investments made with her modest salary and an inheritance from her parents. This modest lifestyle was likely derived from the convent that she joined as a young women but from which she was forced to depart, before taking the final vows of the order, to care for her mother. But this commitment to religious life likely influenced her decision to leave almost the entirety of her estate to a local group of Jesuits who expressed surprise at the size of the bequest but not the fact it came from her. As someone always noted for her devotion to the Catholic faith and teaching, for her to make her last earthly wish be to endow an order known for education seems a way to tie up the last threads of her life quite nicely.
See Sally Morrow & David Gibson, Kansas City teacher astonishes with $2 million gift to Jesuits, Religious News Service, February 9, 2016.
Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.
