royalty
_
of Wall Street has met this Wednesday with King Felipe VI in the Zarzuela Palace.
The New York tycoon with Jewish-Russian roots Matthew Bronfman has presented the monarch with the Gesher (bridge, in Hebrew) award on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, the influential Jewish organization of which he is a member.
Bronfman recognized the King for his role in fostering relations between Spain, Latin America and Israel.
The 62-year-old businessman is known as "the triple heir."
His father was Edgar Miles Bronfman, the second generation at the helm of the Seagram liquor empire, one of the largest distilleries in the world.
His mother, Ann Loeb, was the daughter of John Langeloth Loeb, one of the founders of American Express, and Frances Lehman, a member of the dynasty that created Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that went bankrupt in 2008.
The American Jewish Committee is the world's leading Jewish public diplomacy organization.
The delegation that has come to Spain, of which Bronfman is a part, has great international influence.
His agenda in Madrid proves it.
These days they have also met with the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez;
the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares;
the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso;
the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida;
and the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, among others, on a trip organized by the Centro Sefarad-Israel and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
MADRID, 07/05/2022.- The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at his meeting on Tuesday, July 5, in La Moncloa with the American Jewish Committee, where he "proudly claimed the Jewish heritage of Spain and the deep historical ties that stands with the US and with the Jewish people".
In the first row, third from the left, Matthew Bronfman.Fernando.Calvo (EFE)
According to
The New York Times
, the Bronfman family is "perhaps the greatest force in the Jewish philanthropic world."
Matthew inherited his commitment to the Jewish community from his father.
Edgar Miles Bronfman not only internationalized Seagram gin, he also played a major role in global geopolitics.
In the eighties of the last century, in the midst of the Cold War, he used his power to make contacts with Mikhail Gorbachev and initiated diplomatic relations between Israel and the Soviet Union.
This is how he managed to get Moscow to legalize the Hebrew language in the USSR and so Soviet Jews could legally practice their religion and emigrate to Israel.
He also exposed Austrian President Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past, and helped many Holocaust victims receive financial compensation from German and Swiss banks.
The Bronfman fortune dates back more than a century.
In the late 19th century, the family fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Czarist Russia and settled in Canada.
Samuel Bronfman, founder of the dynasty, made his fortune in the distilled spirits business during the years of Prohibition in the United States, a ban that lasted more than a decade.
By the mid-1950s, Seagram was already one of the world's leading distributors of alcoholic beverages, a conglomerate with branches in various sectors, including the Universal Hollywood movie studios and the PolyGram record company, then the world's largest record company.
In those years, the Bronfmans built their headquarters in New York, the Seagram skyscraper, one of the most iconic works of the modern architect Mies van der Rohe.
The Seagram skyscraper, located at 375 Park Avenue and with 38 floors, shines in the night of Manhattan, in an image from November 1957. Bettmann Archive (Getty Images)
Matthew Bronfman was destined to inherit and run his family's businesses and was trained to do so.
He studied at a boarding school in New Hampshire and at Williams College, an elite private university whose classrooms were attended by Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah of Iran;
film director Elia Kazan;
the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Economics Robert Engle;
or actor David Strathairn (
LA Confidential,
Lincoln
and Oscar nominee for
Good Night, and Good Luck
).
He completed an MBA at Harvard Business School and in the mid-1980s he took his first steps in finance working for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
The
Jerusalem Post
has defined him as a "major American businessman in love with Israel."
Over the years, he has become one of the largest American investors in that country: he is the main shareholder in the Israeli subsidiary of Ikea, Israel Discount Bank and Shufersal, the most popular supermarket chain in Tel Aviv.
He is also the CEO of BHB holdings, a company that manages his family's businesses and investments in numerous sectors: from Wall Street finance to real estate development.
More information
Clare Bronfman, the heir to the liquor empire who invested her fortune in a sect
Bronfman's private life is as colorful as his resume.
He has been married four times and has nine children.
His divorce from his second wife, Canadian heiress Lisa Belzberg, daughter of financial tycoon Samuel Belzberg, was highly publicized.
The couple split in 2002 after some media outlets reported on Belzberg's friendship with Bill Clinton and
Newsweek
published pictures of the heiress with the former US president.
His third divorce, from Stacey Kaye, also attracted the attention of the press.
They separated in 2016, when he began a relationship with the young Israeli Melanie Lavie.
With her he has had her youngest children, James and Stella, the eighth and ninth of this saga.
The Bronfmans have always been as rich as they were prudent and enigmatic.
That discretion was blown up in 2020, when Sara and Clare Bronfman, Matthew's sisters, were sued by 80 former members of NXIVM, a pyramid-shaped organization posing as a self-help group that turned out to be a sect and a network. money laundering and sexual slavery.
According to justice, Clare came to donate 116 million dollars of her personal fortune, about 98 million euros, to the organization led by the now convicted Keith Raniere.
That same year, after admitting her guilt, she was sentenced to almost seven years in prison.
Despite the scandal of
the NXIVM case,
Matthew Bronfman and his family continue to enjoy great prestige in New York high society, where they are considered part
of Wall Street
royalty .
The next generation of the dynasty is also dedicated to the world of finance.
The eldest children of the tycoon, the result of his first marriage, follow in his footsteps with their own investment companies in the real estate market.
