Career
His family were originally Iraqi Jews from Baghdad who later migrated to Bombay (Mumbai), India in the mid-eighteenth century. Elly Kadoorie arrived in Shanghai from Bombay in 1880 as an employee of the Sephardi Jewish firm David Sassoon & Sons. Within a few years he had accumulated large sums of money and had gone into business on his own account, with companies in both Shanghai and Hong Kong.
He became the largest shareholder when CLP was restructured in early 20th century.
He was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1926 Birthday Honours. In 1942, Kadoorie was taken away from his home in Shanghai and interned in a Japanese prison camp for foreign civilians.
He died in prison in 1944. The tombstone of their grave is amongst only four Jewish Graves in Shanghai which remained intact and were not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
