Manfred Ohrenstein, a fiery reformer who, while relegated to the Democratic minority of the New York State Senate for 34 years, successfully championed progressive legislation that safeguarded rent controls, legalized abortion and repealed the death penalty, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by his son, David.
Mr. Ohrenstein, who settled in New York as a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, started in liberal reform politics in New York by joining Eleanor Roosevelt and others in a coalition that challenged Tammany Hall, the political machine that had long monopolized the city’s Democratic Party. In the 1960 primary, he defeated the incumbent state senator from Manhattan’s West Side in what was regarded as one of the reform movements first major victories over the regular party organization.
In 1975, he again stunned the party establishment by defeating the handpicked choice of the Democratic governor and state party chairman to lead the Senate minority — a position he would hold until he retired in 1994.
While a minority leader’s power often rests in his ability to defeat legislation rather than enact it, Mr. Ohrenstein compiled an enviable record of advancing his progressive agenda.
However, his career trajectory also spoke volumes about the dodgy ethos of Albany. For an insurgent who promised to disrupt the politics of self-preservation, personified by blinkered incumbency, he remained in office for more than three decades.
And for a reformer who vowed to dislodge the clubby, bipartisan, back-scratching power structure in Albany, with its blind eye to ethics, he himself was engulfed in scandal for a time — indicted on 564 counts of conspiracy, grand larceny and other charges related to using public funds to pay for campaign workers, a practice he justified as business as usual.
According to the indictment, in 1987, Mr. Ohrenstein’s legislative staffers continued to collect their salaries while working full-time on campaigns for Democratic Senate candidates.
His lawyer argued that Mr. Ohrenstein had no idea that his legislative employees were not actually working on their state jobs full time, and that if they weren’t doing so he should not be held criminally liable in any case; assigning legislative employees to work full time in election campaigns was a time-honored practice, the lawyer said.
Despite the indictment, Mr. Ohrenstein was handily re-elected in 1988, running on a record that included bringing financial stability to the City University of New York, advocating for gay rights and, in the mid-1970s, forging a constructive bipartisan relationship with Warren M. Anderson, leader of the Senate’s Republican majority. Together they had helped resolve the fiscal crises facing the New York State Urban Development Corporation and the City of New York.
In 1990, the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, dismissed 445 of the indictment’s counts on the grounds that Mr. Ohrenstein’s conduct “was not prohibited in any manner.” Concluding that the remaining charges would be too difficult to prove, the prosecutor asked that they be dropped before the case went to trial.
“I am gratified that I have been vindicated,” Mr. Ohrenstein said afterward. “My faith in the law is reaffirmed.”
The Legislature subsequently clarified its rules prohibiting no-show legislative jobs for campaign workers.
Mr. Ohrenstein’s colleagues were largely sympathetic. “There was a feeling that somehow the circumstances and rules had changed and that, ironically, Fred — of all people — found himself charged with abuse of the system which he had been committed to change,” Senator Franz S. Leichter said at the time.
Karen S. Burstein, another senator whose vote helped make Mr. Ohrenstein the minority leader in 1975, said: “Being in the minority for such a long time is an awful frustration. It becomes more and more urgent to get one’s views across. Overzealousness can tip the balance so that one crosses the line of the right thing to do.”
Manfred Ohrenstein was born in Mannheim, Germany, on Aug. 5, 1925, the son of Jewish parents who were born in Poland. In 1938, less than a week before the Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms, the family fled to Cologne and then to London before settling in Brooklyn.
His father, Markus, had a furniture business in Germany and became a men’s sportswear manufacturer in New York. His mother, Fanny (Hollander) Markus, oversaw the household.
Fred, as he was known, graduated from a yeshiva in Brooklyn, earned a degree from Brooklyn College in 1948 and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He received his law degree from Columbia University in 1951 and was later an Army Reserve captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He worked as a prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney, Frank S. Hogan.
In 1960, The New York Post called Mr. Ohrenstein a “standout example of the new young leadership that is spearheading the drive to reform the Democratic Party.” Running for the State Senate to represent the 25th District, he defeated the incumbent, John F. Farrell, for the Democratic nomination, scoring what was considered one of the reform movement’s first major victories.
Early in his Senate career, Mr. Ohrenstein was instrumental in advancing bills that repealed capital punishment and, in 1970, guaranteed women the right to an abortion, the latter legislation coming three years before the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. He also consistently defended renters, who composed most of his constituents, against higher charges and other impingements by landlords.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Marilyn Bacher; a daughter, Nancy Ohrenstein; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Ohrenstein was a founder of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. When he retired from the Senate, he resumed the practice of law. He was later appointed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to task forces on the City University of New York and on the New York City Board of Elections.
His former colleague Mr. Leichter, who had worked in Mr. Ohrenstein’s 1960 campaign, sought to put the whole of his career in perspective.
“It’s a seductive path,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “The system in Albany is so rigid that it can tend to overwhelm you. You become so frustrated, and the feeling is that there is no way to break through it or function outside it.”
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