Philip Wattenberg, a prominent American Zionist, and former member of the Executive Committee of the Zionist Organisation of America, and of the Executive of the American Jewish Congress, died here at 7 o’clock this morning after a severs attack of asthma.
Mr. Wattenberg had just arrived in Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, together with a number of other American tourists who had come to Palestine a week ago on board the “Aquitania” for the Passover pilgrimage and the Palestine Levant Fair. He felt well when he arrived and went to his hotel at 11 o’clock last night, but at 5 o’clock this morning, he woke up feeling unwell, and the proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Amdursky, called a doctor, who stated that there was no hope.
Mr. Wattenberg, was talking till the end only of Palestine, and his last words were: I am glad that I am dying in Palestine.
Mr. Wattenberg, who was a prominent New York businessman, was in Palestine in 1925 for the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and he gave at that time a sum of 100,000 dollars for the erection of the building for the University Department of Physics and Mathematics, named the Einstein Balfour Institute in honour of Professor Einstein and Lord Balfour.
In accordance with his own wish, Philip Wattenberg was buried to-day in Jerusalem, the funeral taking place at 2 o’clock this afternoon. As Jewish law prohibits funeral addresses during the month of Nissan, only very brief eulogies were delivered by Mr. Emanuel Neuman, the American member of the Jewish Agency Executive, and Mrs. Archibald Silverman, one of the leading American women Zionists.
The funeral was arranged by the Jewish Agency and the Hadassah Hospital, and Kaddish was said by Mr. Taub, a personal friend of Mr. Wattenberg’s in America, who had come with him on his Palestine tour.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
