Horace Günzburg

After the Crimean War, his father, Joseph Günzburg, then a wealthy merchant and army contractor, settled with his family in St. Petersburg.

The work which made him so widely popular among the Jews was his unremitting effort, in which frequent appeals to the Russian government were involved, toward the improvement of the legal status of his coreligionists, and for the securing by legislation, as well as by other means, of their economic and moral welfare.

In 1880 he became a member of the board of governors of the temporary commission for the organization of a society for the purpose of encouraging Russian Jews to engage in agriculture and trades.

He employed the lawyer, Emmanuel Levin, an auto-didact working within the system zakonmost of reformed juridical institutions.

In 1880, together with Samuel Polyakov and Nikolai Bakst [ru], Baron Gunzburg petitioned Tsar Alexander II for permission to start an assistance fund which would provide vocational education and training in practical occupations like handicrafts and agriculture for thousands of Russian Jews then living in poverty in the Pale of Settlement and would help them to help themselves.

For many years he was an alderman of St. Petersburg, but, upon the passage of a statute prohibiting the election of Jewish aldermen, vacated that office.

The seventieth birthday of Baron Günzburg, which was also the fortieth anniversary of his entry into public affairs, was celebrated all over Europe and the United States.

In New York a Baron de Günzburg Fund was started, the interest of which was given periodically as a premium for the best work on Jewish history and literature.