Fulfilling a Family Bequest – More than 100 Years Later

It all started with a grainy, black-and-white photo of a woman golfing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Clad in a dark top, white skirt and laced, heeled shoes that aren’t typical desert fare, the woman draws back her club, as if squaring up to hit an invisible ball. A man dressed in all white looks on, holding a bag of golf clubs at the ready. The pyramid looms overhead.

In the late 1990s, I asked my father-in-law, John F. Merritt—who has since passed—about the picture that hung on the wall of his Century City home. Who the heck was that woman, I had to know.

As he explained it, the elegant golfer was his late Scotland-born mother Ruth Davida Wolffe, who would later marry his father, a rabbi from the U.S. Midwest. My questions sent me down a path that uncovered a fascinating chapter in my husband’s family history; one that ties him to early Zionism, a “Maccabean Pilgrimage” and Jewish settlers in Nairobi, Kenya. It also pointed me to a piece of unfinished business: a bequest made in 1917 which had not yet been fulfilled.

I began researching my husband’s family in earnest a decade ago, using online resources, digitized newspapers and even a book from the Los Angeles Public Library. I learned that Ruth was golfing in Egypt in 1913 while visiting her father David Wolffe. The two must have traveled to Jerusalem from Cairo, and in a hotel lobby in the Jewish capital, Ruth met Rabbi Max Merritt, whom she would later marry.

David turned out to be one of the early British Zionists. He is mentioned in the official proceedings of the first and several subsequent Zionist Congresses. He wasn’t one of the most prominent Jewish leaders but he left enough of a newspaper trail that I was able to track.

He and his wife Augusta Wolffe traveled often and moved homes frequently, first from Prussia to Glasgow, where they helped establish the Garnethill Synagogue in 1865. David also founded Glasgow’s chapter of Chovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), which helped save Eastern European Jews from pogroms by encouraging them to settle in Mandatory Palestine, in 1892.

In 1897, David joined a group of British Jewish leaders on a first-ever kosher and Shabbat-observant tour of Palestine, organized by Thomas Cook. The so-called “Maccabean Pilgrimage” took 20 men and women from London to Paris, down to Marseilles and over to Alexandria, Egypt, before sailing up the coast to Jaffa.

From Jaffa, the group took a train to Jerusalem in time to celebrate Passover. I found a photo of the group in a book from the L.A. Public Library; a biography of the British Zionist leader Herbert Bentwich. David is sporting a wonderful pith helmet and an enormous moustache.

David’s published writings suggest that the trip solidified his enthusiasm for a renewed Jewish presence in Palestine, but he remained concerned about the lack of progress with the Ottoman Empire. He was an early investor in the Jewish Colonial Trust – the forerunner of today’s Bank of Israel. David toured England and Scotland to promote and encourage investment in the JCT, which Theodor Herzl backed, to fund programs and purchase land in Palestine.

He attended at least four of the early Zionist Congresses and visited Palestine several more times, including in 1913, when he photographed Ruth golfing in Cairo.

Despite his support for Jewish life in Palestine, David also acquired 1,000 acres of Kenyan farmland and was living in Nairobi with two of his adult sons by 1907. This was at a time when a controversial proposal, the “Uganda scheme,” suggested establishing a Jewish homeland in Africa as a way to speed up rescue of Eastern European Jews. Henry Joshua Wolffe, one of David’s sons, was the first president of the Nairobi Hebrew Congregation and is buried in the small Jewish cemetery there.

David wrote his will in February 1917 on a trip to London. Henry Snowman, the attorney who translated Hatikvah into English, signed it, and an executor was Leopold Kessler, an engineer who would later own the Jewish Chronicle and lead the Jewish National Fund. David may have been in London at the time to attend the Feb. 11, 1917 meeting of the English Zionist Federation, during which Chaim Weizmann was named their president.

David died in Djibouti in 1919, likely aboard a ship in the Red Sea, heading back to England after World War I. As a result, his personal papers were lost to time and history.

Nevertheless, I found David’s will online in the digitized records of Ancestry.com and discovered that he’d requested to donate his 30 shares of the original Jewish Colonial Trust to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

I had no idea where those shares might be or even if there were any relevant records.

Then, in 2023, at a meeting of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies in London, I heard a talk by Jonathan Kirsch, director of the Israel administrator general, in charge of locating and returning unclaimed property.

Kirsch explained that we could convert David’s unclaimed JCT shares to a cash equivalent. All we needed to do was check the name in the online database and file a claim.

I found David’s name easily and submitted a request to have the shares donated to the hospital.

There were some bumps in the road in dealing with the Israeli government, especially after the tragic events of October 7, 2023, which made the donation effort a very low priority. But eventually we were able to satisfy the government’s identity requirements, and, in 2024, some $32,000 was transferred to the hospital.

David didn’t say how he wanted the funds allocated. We decided that since only four of his and Augusta’s 13 children lived to adulthood, it would be meaningful to donate the funds to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care department. Shaarei Zedek delivers more than 22,000 babies a year, the most active maternity department in the Western world.

In December my husband and I visited the hospital and dedicated a small plaque to David and Augusta. More than a century after the fact, a promise has been kept.

Marian Merritt is a Los Angeles native and amateur genealogist.