Maurice Alter

Moses "Maurice" Alter was a Polish Jew who survived the war and reached Australia as a displaced person, arriving with nothing. He studied electrical engineering by correspondence, worked night shifts in a textile factory and sold real estate by day, and bought his first two shops in Kew in the mid-1950s. He founded the Pacific Group in 1979 and built shopping centres across Victoria and South Australia — Werribee Plaza, Pacific Epping — and was one of only ten people to appear on every Australian rich list from the first in 1984 until his death. He and his wife Helen gave to Jewish education, above all to Mount Scopus Memorial College, Melbourne's principal Jewish day school.