Ellis Kadoorie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (July 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Sir Ellis Kadoorie (1865 - 1922), philanthropist and member of the wealthy Baghdadian family that had large business interests in the Far East. His brother was Sir Elly Kadoorie, and his nephew was Lawrence Kadoorie. His family were originally Iraqi Jews from Baghdad who later migrated to Bombay (Mumbai), India in the mid-eighteenth century.

Ellis Kadoorie arrived in Shanghai from Bombay in 1880 as an employee of the Sephardi Jewish firm David Sassoon & Sons. Within a few years he had accumulated large sums of money and had gone into business on his own account, with companies in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. Over the next two decades, the Kadoorie brothers made their fortunes, achieving success in banking, rubber plantations, electric power utilities and real estate, and gaining a major share-holding in Hong Kong Hotels Limited.

Sir Ellis was knighted in 1917.

In the 1910s Sir Ellis founded several schools in China and Hong Kong.

Sir Ellis died in the British colony in Hong Kong in the year 1922 and was buried in the SongQingLin Memorial Park near HongQiao Road, Shanghai.

According to his testament, he left £100,000 for the development of education in Palestine. There was great rejoicing in the Zionist Organization; naturally, everyone assumed the money was intended for Jewish education. Hebert Samuel set up a committee to plan how the money would be spent. Only some time later was Kadoorie's will read carefully, and then it turned out that the beneficiary was not specifically the British administration in Palestine but the British government in London and Kadoorie had granted it the choice of whether to invest in Palestine or Iraq. There was no indication in his will that the money was intended to be used for Hebrew education. In the ensuing commotion, Weizmann trotted out the deceased man's brother and managed at least to obtain a decision that the sum be invested in Palestine. Eventually it was decided to build two separate agricultural schools in Israel - The Kadoorie Agricultural High School which was built in the Lower Galilee for the Israeli-Jews, and another agricultural school was built in Tulkarm for the Israeli-Arabs.