British Jewish publisher and philanthropist Lord George Weidenfeld died at age 96.

He was born in Vienna in 1919 and fled to London in 1938 following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

After working for the BBC, Weidenfeld along with Nigel Nicolson founded the Weidenfeld & Nicolson publishing company in 1949 and remained its chairman up to his death. Among the many Weidenfeld and Nicolson publications were books on art and archeology based to some extent on collections of the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Weidenfeld was active in many charities across England, Israel and other parts of the world.

He received knighthood in 1969 and was made a life peer in 1976 in the House of Lords.

The Holocaust survivor credited Christians with helping him escape the Nazis, and in one last act of kindness he launched Operation Safe Havens in honor to prepay the British family who had taken him in as a teenager.

The operation, launched last year, rescued 20,000 Christian families from Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and resettled them elsewhere.

In 2009 he was the recipient of the Jerusalem Foundation’s Teddy Kollek Life Achievement Award. It was one of many awards for publishing and service to humanity that he received from Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Israel.