by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Staff Writer

July 7, 2009

The Jewish Federation of Greater Trenton — a predecessor of the present United Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks — had a rule that members of the board of its Jewish Community Foundation could not serve longer than 10 years. But when George Warren completed his decade of service, former foundation president Richard Glazer said, “We chickened out. We changed the rule just so we could keep George on.”

Glazer, a longtime client of Warren’s as well as a friend, described the lawyer as “the voice of reason, the person the elders would go to whenever there was a problem.”

Now, everyone will have to adjust to his absence. Warren, who served as chair of the foundation and as president of the Jewish Community Center of Princeton Mercer Bucks, died on June 21 at the age of 95.

He passed away at Greenwood House, the facility for seniors that he helped develop together with fellow lay leader Natalie Marcus. His mother was one of the founders, and he was devoted to its upkeep throughout his life. To the end, he was an honorary member of Greenwood’s board of trustees.

Warren also helped establish the Ewing JCC, out of gratitude — he always said — for the role the Trenton JCC played in his own youth. He said that without it, he would have been better acquainted with the Department of Corrections.

Despite that inauspicious start, he lived what those around him describe as an exemplary life. Delivering the eulogy at his father’s funeral in Ewing on June 24, his son, William, said, “In all ways, great and small, my father was very quietly a very good man all of his very long life, and we are all the better for it.”

Warren was the son of Rachel and William, impoverished immigrants who never mastered much English. With help from his extended family, Warren managed to pay his way through law school at New York University. He returned to NYU a few years later, while working, to complete a doctor of jurisprudence.

He studied under Professor Arthur T. Vanderbilt, who later became chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. He was so impressed by Warren that after World War II — during which the young lawyer served as a captain with the United States Army — Vanderbilt hired him to work for his Newark law firm.

Later, after Warren opened his own law practice in Trenton, Vanderbilt saw to it that he was appointed guardian ad litem in as many as 4,000 cases, representing clients — whether or not they could pay — who could not take care of their own interests.

One of those clients was a fetus. The mother needed a blood transfusion but was refusing one on religious grounds, jeopardizing both her and her baby’s survival. Warren handled the case with such aplomb that the woman went on to make George the baby’s middle name.

Glazer said Warren was a lawyer who treated law as a profession, not a business, and described him as a man whose “calm wisdom” won the trust of clients and colleagues before his retirement in 1995.

William — a lawyer himself — said of his father, “He could write a will, sell a company, handle a divorce, buy a house, protect the assets of an elderly woman with dementia, tell a client how to improve his son’s academic performance or how to deal with an alcoholic daughter. And he could do this at the same time that he taught appellate practice at NYU School of Law at night or one of a number of courses at the Rutgers-Newark and Rutgers-Camden law schools.

“His like no longer exists, and the profession and the community are the poorer for it.”

In addition to William, Warren is survived by his wife of 62 years, Clarice Kramer Warren; his son, James I. Warren, and his daughter, Lisbeth A. Warren; his grandchildren, Andrew T. Warren, Kathryn L. Whitlatch, Sara Warren, Alexandra T. Warren, and Rachel Cantlay; and his daughters-in-law, Diane Snyder and Janis Warren, and his son-in-law, Robert Cantlay.

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