THE former president of Bradford Hebrew Congregation synagogue, who came to the district as a boy on the Kindertransport, has died, aged 94.

Albert Waxman, of Nab Wood, fled Nazi Europe in 1939, aged 14. He travelled to Britain on the Kindertransport, bringing 10,000 Jewish children to safety, and was one of 24 boys living in a hostel in Manningham.

Mr Waxman was from Saarbrucken, Germany, the only child in his town chosen for the Kindertransport. Talking to the T&A in 2012, he recalled the persecution of Jews in the 1930s. “We were no longer allowed to go to school, or swimming or sit on park benches," he said. His family home was invaded by SS officers during the Kristallnacht of November 1938, which saw Jewish businesses looted: “They came in black uniforms, we fled to the attic. When we came down, everything was smashed up."

His family was arrested and sent to Poland, because his parents had Polish heritage, but a stroke of luck saved them from concentration camps. “Of huge crowds at the border, we were one of two families not allowed through, because my brother and I weren’t on our parents’ passport. The Gestapo sent us away," he said.

Arriving in the UK, he stayed in a converted holiday camp in Kent - “I looked at it as an adventure.," he said. "I was pleased to be leaving Germany, it was my only chance of escape" - before settling at the Bradford Jewish Refugee Hostel, set up by Oswald Stroud, founder of worsted manufacturers Stroud Riley Drummond on Lumb Lane.

The boys went to Drummond School where they learned English, and were forbidden to speak German. In 1989, 50 years after they came to Bradford, Mr Waxman organised a reunion and produced a brochure about the hostel which revealed details of daily life there - pillow fights, playing cricket, going to the cinema to see King Kong and collecting bluebells in Heaton Woods for Mr Stroud’s mother.

At the end of the war Mr Waxman discovered his parents were living under false names in Paris. He was the only boy in Bradford’s refugee hostel whose parents survived the Holocaust. He met his wife, Lily, in Bradford and in 1958 he founded A Waxman (Fibres) Ltd, which became Waxman Ceramics, one of the UK’s leading distributors of tiles and mosaic.

In 1989 Mr Waxman tracked down others from the Manningham hostel for a reunion, filmed for a TV programme. “We never forgot the kindness of Bradford," he said.

Bradford Synagogue newsletter The Star reported that Mr Waxman was president of the Bradford Hebrew Congregation for 29 years before the deconsecration of the Shipley synagogue in 2013.