Background
Bronfman was born in Brandon, Manitoba, to a family from Bessarabia who had brought their rabbi with them.
Bronfman was born in Brandon, Manitoba, to a family from Bessarabia who had brought their rabbi with them.
His schooling ended at the age of fifteen.
He worked with his father peddling firewood and frozen whitefish.
After an apprenticeship with Distillers Trust in Scotland, he joined his elder brothers in the hotel business and in his early twenties took charge of a hotel in Winnipeg, Manitoba. When prohibition was introduced in Manitoba in 1916, the Bronfman family entered the liquor trade and Sam developed the mail-order side of the business. Prohibited by legislation passed in 1918 from manufacturing liquors, the Bronfmans obtained a license to sell drugs and liquors for medicinal purposes, and Sam established connections with American bootleggers, who transported their liquor by car, air, and sea. By 1929, with Sam virtually running the family business after joining Distillers Corporation-Seagram Ltd., the Bronfman concern had become one of the world’s largest distilleries.
When prohibition ended in 1933 Bronfman settled into the life of a Montreal millionaire and did his utmost to gain the respect of the community. He moved into the lucrative U.S. liquor market, producing quality blended whiskies in keeping with his definition, “distilling is a science; blending is an art.”
Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc. became a multinational corporation with headquarters in New York, operating in over 120 countries with sales of over a billion dollars. During the early 1950s, Bronfman took Seagram’s into the petroleum business and in 1963 acquired Texas Pacific Oil Company, one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States.
In 1951 he set up Cemp Investment Ltd., which grew into one of the western world’s most impressive private investment instruments. Bronfman’s own version of the history of Seagram’s, "From Little Acorns", was published in 1970.
Traditionally Jewish, Samuel Bronfman gave generously to Jewish charities and endowed academic chairs, art collections and business fellowships. The Samuel Bronfman Building at McGill University in Montreal (of which he was a governor) houses the faculties of management and languages.
He also served as chairman of Montreal’s Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (1934-1950), and at the outbreak of World War II he set up the Canadian Jewish Congress Refugee Committee which was instrumental in persuading the Canadian government to allow 1,200 Jewish “orphans ’ (and their parents) from Europe to enter the country. He was president of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1938 to 1961, during which time he was the most dominant power in Canadian Jewry, strongly supporting Israel throughout. The Canadian Jewish Congress offices are situated in the Samuel Bronfman House, built in Montreal in 1968.
(The story of Distillers Corporation-Seagrams Ltd tells th...)
1970
