Reuben and Rose Mattus

Reuben and Rose Mattus were Polish Jewish entrepreneurs who founded the Häagen-Dazs ice cream business.

Reuben Mattus (1912 – January 27, 1994) was born in Poland of Jewish parents. He arrived at the Port of New York on the SS Vestris with his widowed mother Lea on March 5, 1921, several months before Rose Vesel. He started in the ice cream business as a child of 10, joining his uncle who was in the Italian lemon-ice business in Brooklyn, helping his mother squeeze lemons for the ices. By the late 1920s, the family began making ice pops, and by 1929 chocolate-covered ice cream bars and sandwiches under the name Senator Frozen Products, selling them from a horse-drawn wagon in The Bronx.

Rose Vesel Mattus (November 23, 1916 – November 28, 2006) was born in Manchester, United Kingdom as Rose Vesel to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland. They made theatrical costumes and briefly moved to Belfast with a theatre company and emigrated to New York as steerage passengers on board the SS Berengaria in October 1921 when Rose was five years old.

Reuben and Rose met in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York. After finishing high school, Rose went to work as a book-keeper at the Senator plant in 1934, and the two married in 1936. Reuben consulted some books and started to make a new heavy kind of ice cream. In 1959, he decided to form a new ice cream company with a foreign-sounding name. He invented the Danish-sounding 'Häagen-Dazs' as a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, adding an umlaut which does not exist in Danish, and even put a map of Denmark on the carton.

...
Wikipedia