Max Webb

Max Webb (born March 2, 1917) is a Polish-born American real estate developer and philanthropist from Los Angeles, California. A Holocaust survivor, he is the co-founder of one of the largest real estate development companies in Southern California. He has supported charitable causes in the United States and Israel.

Webb was born on March 2, 1917 in Łódź, Poland. He had five sisters and one brother. He grew up 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. Webb 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 Munchberg with Nathan Shapell, where they established a textile business. In 1951, he stayed on Coney Island for ten months to get a visa for the United States. 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. In 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.

He has made charitable contributions to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He 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. In December 2007, he 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.

In 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.

He was married twice. He first married Sara Shapell in 1946. They had two daughters, Helen and Rose. After his first wife died, he married Anna Hitter, a businesswoman, in 1993.

He is a member of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. He attends services at Congregation Beth Israel on Beverly Boulevard.