Samuel Sebba

Samuel Sebba (16 March 1905–10 April 2005), was 'a businessman and philanthropist. Born in Latvia, Samuel Sebba arrived in London as a child; his father, a timber merchant, helped to found the Adath Yisrael Synagogue. Educated at Dame Alice Owen’s School, Islington, and at the LSE, Samuel became a City solicitor and served as a Hackney borough councillor. During the 1950s he invested in property; his company, Warnford Investments, went public in 1962. From then onwards philanthropy became his major focus, and in 1967 he founded the Samuel Sebba Charitable Trust, supporting a wide range of causes, religious and secular, in Britain and Israel. He made aliyah in the early 1970s but died in London, three weeks after celebrating his hundredth birthday there. His daughter-in-law Anne Sebba, the daughter of prominent solicitor [Samuel] Eric Rubinstein MBE (29 July 1912–8 February 1997), read history at KCL. Following graduation she became a Reuters correspondent, and was the first woman accepted by that news agency as a trainee.'