Lazar Brodsky

Origins and early life

Lazar Brodsky was born in 1848 at Zlatopol in the Kiev province, the son of Israel Brodsky, founder of the family's sugar business, in a Jewish family that never converted and that made its money in the beet fields and refineries of Ukraine.

Work and career

With his brother Lev he built that business into the largest sugar concern of the Russian Empire, controlling by the 1890s about a quarter of all Russian sugar production and exporting to Persia and China; he also ran mills, a river shipping line and a paper works, and Kiev's contemporaries called him the sugar king. What he did with the money is why he is here. He paid for a large part of the civic infrastructure of imperial Kiev: he was the principal private funder of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, opened in 1898, which trained the engineers of the region for the next century; he founded and endowed the Bacteriological Institute, one of the first in the empire, and paid for the Kiev free out-patient clinic which treated tens of thousands a year without charge and without regard to religion; and he financed the city theatre.

For his own community, living under the disabilities of Russian law and the shadow of the pogroms, he built the Jewish hospital, the trade school, the orphanage and the choral synagogue of Kiev, which was named after him and stands today; he supported Jewish schools throughout the empire, sent relief to pogrom victims, and put money into the settlement of Jews in Palestine. He died at Bad Homburg on 2 October 1904, and his will directed the greater part of his fortune to charity.