(JTA) — In 1992, Edgar Bronfman was preparing to leave North America for Paris for his first meeting with then-French President Francois Mitterand at the Elysee Palace when at the last minute Bronfman decided he wanted to take an unexpected meeting in Geneva instead. So he asked Serge Cwajgenbaum, Bronfman’s right-hand man in Europe, to…
Six years ago, I had lunch with Edgar Bronfman, along with the Samuel Bronfman Foundation’s executive director, Dana Raucher, at the Four Seasons in New York. The dining area was quiet and empty, and I was nervous. Dana whispered to me, “There’s Barbara Walters. Don’t look.” I was there to tell Edgar how much it…
Last summer in Israel, one of the teenage Bronfman Fellows asked me why the group wasn’t required to pray together every morning. He found it to be offensive, and a real loss that a pluralistic group of Jews weren’t learning to pray as a means to transcend their differences of opinion and practice. I took…
Edgar Bronfman, did not know me, and I had limited interactions with him. Yet I feel a deep sense of loss at his passing. In 1988, as a Russian emigre living in Brooklyn, I was completely unaffiliated, and turned off by the Jewish community. Yet my alienation did not disqualify me from being selected to…
My first meeting with Edgar was not what you’d call auspicious. I was 17 and had just, mysteriously, been selected for Edgar’s newest philanthropic venture, the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in Israel. This was a mystery because I was a very sheepish and reluctant Jew — as Edgar himself had been at that age — and…
Over the course of his life, Edgar Bronfman, who died December 21 at age 84, founded and supported innumerable Jewish charitable causes, including many with other members of his family. But among those he launched on his own, he considered the most significant to be the Bronfman Youth Fellowships, a Jewish identity program for Israelis…
(JTA) — In the coming days, many eulogies will attempt to capture the magnitude of the loss suffered this week by the Jewish community. Really, though, all you need are eight words: Edgar Bronfman was a prince of his people. There are other machers who devote much of their time and money to Jewish causes. But…
Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of the Seagram Company and long-serving president of the World Jewish Congress, died at his New York home on Saturday aged 84. Montreal-born Bronfman took control of the Seagram empire from his father, Samuel Bronfman who had founded the liquor company in 1924. He then expanded its…
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