Otto Schiff (humanitarian)

Otto Moritz Schiff CBE (8 May 1875 in Frankfurt – 15 November 1952 in London) was a British Jewish banker and philanthropist.

In 1896, at the age of twenty-one, he immigrated to London, where he became a partner in the merchant banking firm Bourke, Schiff and Co. His younger brother Ernst followed.

Ernst Schiff received an MBE as manager of the Poland Street Refuge for Belgian Refugees in 1918.

This originally served as the first port of call for Jews from Eastern Europe who fled from there to Great Britain to avoid political persecution by the Russian Tsarist regime and later by the Bolsheviks.

[5] He, as chairman of the German Jewish Aid Committee, became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1939 Birthday Honours.