Felix M. Warburg

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Felix Moritz Warburg (1871 - 20 September 1937) was a member of the Warburg banking family of Hamburg, Germany. He was a grandson of Moses Marcus Warburg, one of the founders of the bank, M. M. Warburg, which was founded in that city, in 1798. He was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and an advocate of a federal reserve system for the United States. He married Frieda Schiff, daughter of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. senior partner, Jacob Schiff, and Frederick Marcus, Gerald Felix, Paul Felix and Edward Mortimer Morris, who were sons of theirs, were all active in community service.

Warburg was an important leader in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to help the Jews in Europe in the period leading up to, and especially during, the Great Depression. Warburg actively raised funds in the United States on behalf of European Jews who faced hunger following World War I. As early as 1919, he was quoted in the New York Times discussing the dire situation of Jewish war sufferers.[1]

“ The successive blows of contending armies have all but broken the back of European Jewry, and have reduced to tragically unbelievable poverty, starvation and disease about 6,000,000 souls, or half the Jewish population of the earth.

The Jewish people throughout Eastern Europe, by sheer accident of geography, have suffered more from the war than any other element of the population.

 ”

Warburg and the Joint Distribution Committee were also instrumental in the 1930s after the global stock exchange crash in 1929.

As a result of his philanthropic activities, a new Jewish village established in Mandate Palestine in 1939, Kfar Warburg, was named after him.

[edit] Further reading

  • Yehuda Bauer (1974) My Brother's Keeper. A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929-1939 Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, ISBN 0-8276-0048-8

[edit] References

  1. ^ Tells sad plight of Jews New Tork Times, 12 November 1919

[edit] External links

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