Lev Brodsky — sugar industrialist and philanthropist with roots in the Russian Empire
Lev (Arieh Leibush) Izrailevich Brodsky was born in 1852 in Zlatopol, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now part of the town of Novomyrhorod in Ukraine. The family's founder, Meir Schor, a member of a rabbinical family, had moved early in the nineteenth century from Brody in Austrian Galicia to Zlatopol and taken the name Brodsky, 'from Brody'. Lev was the younger son of Israel Brodsky (1823–1888), who from the 1840s built up the family's sugar business, first financing refineries for landowners and then managing, leasing and founding plants of his own.
In 1876 the family moved to Kiev. Lev and his elder brother Lazar (1848–1904) inherited and enlarged their father's enterprises, which combined beet fields, sugar mills, refineries, warehouses and a marketing network across the Empire and abroad. In the early 1890s the Brodsky plants produced about a quarter of all the sugar refined in Russia, and the Alexandria Society of Sugar Mills, headed by Lazar, controlled more than a quarter of the Empire's sugar output. At its height the business employed some 10,000 people, and Brodsky sugar was sold from the Caucasus to Central Asia and the Pacific. The family's name became synonymous with sugar, and in Kiev with philanthropy; Sholem Aleichem joked that the city, like the Bible, began with the letter of the Brodskys. A special legal provision allowed the Brodskys, as Jews, to buy property anywhere in the city.
Their father had opened a hundred-bed Jewish hospital in 1885, which the brothers expanded, and Lazar paid for the Choral Synagogue, opened in 1898; the family also funded a Jewish trade school, free schools and other communal institutions. Lev was the principal donor of the clinic of the Society for Aid to Sick Children and of a hospital for the chronically ill, and the Brodskys were among the Kiev businessmen whose private contributions paid for much of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, opened in 1898. After Lazar's death in 1904 Lev headed the family business. He received the French Légion d'honneur.
After the 1917 Revolution the family's property was nationalised, and Lev Brodsky left with his family for Western Europe. He died in Paris in 1923, aged about seventy-one.
"After the Revolution, when the family's enterprises were nationalised, he left with his family for Western Europe; he died in Paris in 1923."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Zlatopol, Kiev Governorate (now Novomyrhorod, Ukraine)
Born in Zlatopol, in the Kiev Governorate, in 1852, the son of the sugar industrialist Israel Brodsky, he spent his working life in Kiev, where he and his brother Lazar enlarged the family business and funded hospitals and schools, before leaving for Western Europe after 1917.
.svg?width=900)
Zlatopol, Kiev Governorate (now Novomyrhorod, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.