The Shlomo Memorial Fund

The Shlomo Memorial Fund

The Shlomo Memorial Fund Limited was incorporated in 1978 as a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, headquartered in London with trustees anchored across the UK and United States. Chairman Amichai Toporowitz, based in Monsey, New York, leads a governance structure that includes long-serving Director and Secretary Channe Lopian alongside trustees Chaim Jehuda Alexander Kaufman and Meir Yosef Sulam. Unlike foundations that outsource investment management to external OCIOs, the Fund holds its assets directly through subsidiary undertakings — a structure that blends charitable purpose with direct property ownership. The portfolio concentrates on UK commercial and industrial real estate, with confirmed holdings stretching from the Northeast of England into Scotland. Properties include the Ashworth Frazer Industrial Estate in Hebburn, the Jubilee Industrial Estate in Ashington, the Metnor Business Park in Wallsend, and Discovery House on the Dundee Technology Park. Commercial assets span retail and leisure — Yates Wine Lodge in Blackpool, the Gala Club in South Shields — alongside mixed-use and office buildings such as Bridge House in Rochdale and Elliott House in Peterlee. The Fund does not appear to allocate to public equities, venture capital, or fixed income in any material way; its strategy is a concentrated bet on directly owned, income-producing property in secondary UK markets. The Fund's income derives from investment property rents, cash deposits, and returns from its subsidiary undertakings. All earnings flow to a single purpose: the provision and distribution of grants for charitable purposes. The governance structure — a company limited by guarantee — means there are no shareholders extracting dividends, reinforcing the endowment's perpetual character. Trustees Kaufman and Sulam hold directorships across multiple subsidiary entities, suggesting a layered corporate architecture designed to hold and manage individual property assets separately. No separate philanthropic foundation sits alongside the Fund; the entity itself is both the investment vehicle and the grant-making body. The Fund's structural distinction lies in its refusal to intermediate. Where most charitable endowments delegate real estate exposure to fund managers or REITs, The Shlomo Memorial Fund employs a direct-ownership model across a geographically concentrated, unglamorous portfolio of secondary-city commercial and industrial assets. This is not a foundation mimicking an institutional investor — it is a property company with a charitable constitution, run by a small trustee board that has maintained this same posture for over four decades.