Real estate developer and philanthropist, Max Webb, Died at 101

  Business

Max Webb was born on March 2, 1917, in Łódź, Poland and died on October 23, 2018.

He was a Polish-born American real estate developer and philanthropist from Los Angeles, California.

Webb was a Holocaust survivor.

Max Webb was also the co-founder of one of the largest real estate development companies in Southern California.

Webb has supported charitable causes in the United States and Israel.

He had six siblings, five sisters, and one brother.

Max was raised in a poor family and stopped going to school at an early age.

During World War II, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. It was there that he met his future brother-in-law, Nathan Shapell.

He also survived the Death March 1944, as well as twelve labor camps and six concentration camps. However, both his parents as well as four of his sisters were murdered by the Nazis.

Webb was liberated on May 8, 1945.

Shortly after his liberation, he moved to Münchberg with Nathan Shapell, where they established a textile business.

Webb stayed on Coney Island for ten months to get a visa for the United States, in 1951. By 1952, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife and brother-in-law and started a career in real estate development.

He established a real estate development company with his two brothers-in-law, Nathan and David Shapell. It was first known as S&S Construction, later Shapell Industries, followed by Shapell & Webb.

During 1971, they moved into an office on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and San Vicente Boulevard. After his brothers-in-law died, he retained the office.

The company became one of the largest real estate development companies in Southern California.

Webb has made charitable contributions to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Webb was a founding donor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.. He endowed a chair for David Wolpe, the Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple.

During December 2007, Max purchased a plot of land on Pico Boulevard to erect a building home to two Jewish organizations in Los Angeles, IKAR and the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA).

With his second wife Anna, he has endowed the Max Webb Family School of Languages Building and the Anna and Max Webb Chair for Visiting Scholars in Yiddish at Tel Aviv University.

They are the recipients of honorary doctorates from Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University.

During 2013, Webb has featured in a fundraising video for Tel Aviv University alongside other prominent Jewish philanthropists from Los Angeles Guilford Glazer, Jona Goldrich, and Izak Parviz Nazarian.

Max Webb passed away at 101 years old.

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