Victor Smorgon

Victor Smorgon's father Naum ran a kosher butcher shop in Ukraine until the Soviets nationalised it in 1927, and the family emigrated to Melbourne, where the brothers reopened the kosher butchery in Carlton North. Victor married Loti Kiffer at the East Melbourne Synagogue in 1937. From meat wholesaling he built Smorgon Consolidated Industries into steel, glass, plastics and paper recycling, at one point the largest privately owned company in Australia. He and Loti were among the country's most generous philanthropists — to the Jewish community, to Israel, to cancer research and to the arts — and he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2007.