Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin

Author:Abigail Pogrebin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419323
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Edgar Bronfman Sr.

EDGAR BRONFMAN SR. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RICHARD LOBELL

MOST BILLIONAIRE EXECUTIVES don’t have a Torah in their corporate office. A Torah under glass, to be precise. But Edgar Bronfman Sr., former president of Seagram’s Co. Ltd. (the liquor giant), has one, displayed importantly in its velvet sheath near his massive desk and his tufted black leather sofa. “I don’t want to put my religion in anyone’s face,” he says. “But this way they know who I am.”

He also has an ornate shofar—the ram’s horn traditionally blown on Rosh Hashanah—made of silver and wood, poised in the middle of his black marble conference table. And there’s a library no yeshiva would sniff at, including a multivolume set of the Talmud and tomes such as Jews and Medicine, Torah Linguistics, and Jewish Law.

All this Judaica is a fairly recent fascination for the seventy-six-year-old Bronfman. As a kid, he rejected Judaism because he rejected his father, Samuel Bronfman, who was a demanding and detached figure in his life. The senior Bronfman, who built Seagram’s from a Canadian distillery into an American empire that made every subsequent Bronfman extremely wealthy, was renowned for being an adroit entrepreneur but an overbearing, volatile man. “I was really rebellious as far as my father was concerned,” Bronfman says, “and I just turned my back on the whole Jewish thing. It really started when I found out that he didn’t know what he was saying when he was praying. He was just reading Hebrew because he had been taught to read it. I didn’t consider that praying: If you don’t know what you’re saying when you’re praying, then I’m outta here. And I left and I didn’t go back to it till I was in my fifties.”

Samuel didn’t care particularly that his son abandoned Judaism after he became a bar mitzvah. “I don’t think he gave much of a damn,” Bronfman says, his hands folded over his green and yellow Hermès tie. “My father went to synagogue because it was expected of him—because he was a leader in the community. But religious he was not.”

Bronfman absorbed his father’s indifference. “I was supposed to go to Sunday school and junior congregation on Saturdays. But since my father didn’t go to synagogue—he went to the office—I didn’t see any reason to go. Sunday school was just dreadful. I’m sure there are seventeen zillion people who will tell you how awful supplemental education is; it’s something we really have to take a hard look at because it’s awful.” It’s become one of his personal crusades—to make Jewish learning intriguing to young people. “I’m chairman of the governing board of Hillel,” he says. “I love to go to different campuses and see the kids—I get big audiences because they want to meet me—and I just love talking to them about being Jewish and how much fun it is. We do study sessions and they’re all blown away— the fact that I can actually discuss the texts with them.”

He can spar on Talmud because he’s been a dedicated student of it ever since the mid-1980s.

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