Ursula Merkin
American philanthropist
Ursula Merkin (1919–July 23, 2006) was a German-born American philanthropist.
Life and career
She was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Isaac Breuer, a noted German Rabbi, as Ursula (Sara) Breuer. In 1933, at the age of fourteen, she left Germany with her family for Palestine. She remained there with her father, to whom she was very close, until his death in Jerusalem in 1946, at the age of 63. Shortly thereafter, she emigrated to the United States, where she found a teaching position at a Jewish girls' school in Paterson, New Jersey.
Family and charitable causes
In 1950 she met and married Hermann Merkin, a German-Jewish businessman, who was twelve years her senior. They had six children and were married for almost fifty years until his death in 1999 at the age of 91. Ursula and Hermann Merkin sponsored the New York venue Merkin Concert Hall and were involved in a variety of Yeshiva University functions as well as with other Jewish philanthropies. They were also deeply devoted to Fifth Avenue Synagogue, of which Hermann Merkin was the founding President.
Ursula Breuer Merkin was a granddaughter of Solomon Breuer, a great-granddaughter of Samson Raphael Hirsch, a great-granddaughter of Eliezer Liepman Philip Prins, and mother of writer Daphne Merkin and philanthropist J. Ezra Merkin.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7901262. VIAF identifies the subject as 77216312. The Library of Congress control number is n00044836. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919, 2006, 1933 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ursula Merkin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.