Founder and director of the Jewish Refugees Committee. Died London.
From Jewish Telegraph Agency, 1952 obituary: "Mr. Schiff was instrumental in rescuing some 12,000 Jews from Germany during the first World War * and helped Jewish refugees from the Nazis from 1933 until recently. He was chairman of one of the first committees in Britain to aid Jewish victims of Nazism. He served in the British Army during the first World War as an enlisted man and was wounded by shrapnel."
* We can find no other reference to large numbers of German Jewish refugees in WW1 so we think this should either refer to WW2 or that the WW1 refugees were Belgian and mostly not Jewish.
From Holocaust Remembrance: "Otto Schiff was born in 1875 in Frankfurt, the nephew of banker Jacob Schiff. In 1896, Otto immigrated to London at the age of 21, where he became a partner in the merchant banking firm Bourke, Schiff and Co. Otto’s brother Ernst later followed in his footsteps. During the First World War, the brothers ran shelters for Belgian refugees. For this work, Otto was awarded an OBE while his brother received an MBE. He was appointed head of the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) ... the UK Jewish community’s international humanitarian agency. From 1933, the Committee was responsible for making the organisational arrangements to bring Jews out of Germany and Austria to Britain, for supporting them financially once there, and for helping them to find accommodation and employment. Otto Schiff was instrumental in setting up the necessary support infrastructure to maintain the Jewish refugees from Nazism in Britain and received the CBE in recognition of his role at the JRC, which included supporting the child refugees who came on the Kindertransport. Otto Schiff was also President of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter, which assisted Jewish refugees. Following his death in 1952, Otto Schiff bequeathed his locally listed mansion, 14 Netherhall Gardens {now Otto Schiff House}, as a Trust and care home for the benefit of the refugees of Nazi oppression."
Not to be confused with the Dutch fencer of the same name (1892 – 1978).
