Lazar Brodsky

Lazar Brodsky and his brother Lev inherited their father’s sugar business, and Lazar went on to head the Alexandria Sugar Mills company, which controlled more than a quarter of the Russian Empire’s sugar output. He founded the Second Dnieper Steamship Company, sat on the Kyiv stock exchange committee and the city council, and held shares in most of Kyiv’s big enterprises, from the waterworks to the steam flour mill on Podil.

His best-known gift to the city is the Choral Synagogue, built in 1897–1898 on his own estate on Mala Vasylkivska Street (today 13 Shota Rustaveli Street). To get round a ban on synagogues in the city centre, it was presented as a prayer house within a private estate. The Soviets closed it and gave it to a puppet theatre; it was returned to the Jewish community in the late 1990s.

Brodsky funded the Jewish hospital and schools, the Bacteriological Institute, the expansion of the university maternity clinic, a tuberculosis sanatorium in Pushcha-Vodytsia and the Trinity People’s House. He was one of the initiators and main sponsors of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Money he left (about 500,000 rubles) paid for the covered Bessarabsky Market, completed in 1912.

Brodsky died in Basel in 1904; his body was brought back to Kyiv, honoured at the Choral Synagogue and buried at the Lukianivka Jewish cemetery (the tomb has not survived). A Kyiv street, Simi Brodskykh (Brodsky Family Street), commemorates the brothers.