The Bronfan’s on the road to respectability but not for long soon veering off and getting heavily involved with David Ben-Gurian and the creation of Zionist Israel (Part 2)

In 1934, Samuel Bronfman was made president of the National Jewish Peoples Relief Committee of Canada.

In 1939, he was named director of the Jewish Colonization Committee, formerly the Baron de Hirsch Fund (the same agency that had paid his father’s way to Canada exactly fifty years earlier).

Links to David Ben-Gurian and the Haganah (Israeli Defence Force)

At the close of World WWII, Samuel Bronfman established the National Conference of Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation. Despite the fancy name, the organization was principally involved in smuggling military equipment to the Haganah Jewish underground in Palestine.

In the spring of 1947, David Ben-Gurion took it upon himself to direct the general policy of the Haganah, in preparation for the impending Arab attack. On May 26, 1948, the Provisional Government of Israel decided to transform the Haganah into the regular army of the State, to be called “Zeva Haganah Le-Yisrael” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

On May 31, 1948, as part of the order of the day establishing the IDF, David Ben-Gurion said: “With the establishment of the State of Israel, the Haganah emerged from the underground to become a regular army. Both the yishuv and the Jewish people are greatly indebted to the Haganah for its contribution during the various phases of its existence and development….In the chronicles of the people of Israel, the saga of the Haganah will shine with splendor and majesty that eternally will never dim.”

By this time, the Bronfman sons had transformed their bootleg fortune into a “legitimate” business-Seagrams Distillers of Canada.

In the next generation, the family would move, by marriage, into the very center of the Zionist Establishment of North America.

Edgar Bronfman married Ann Loeb, thereby becoming attached to the Loeb Rhodes interests of Wall Street.

Phyllis Bronfman married Jean Lambert, and suddenly the Bronfman’s were in the extended Rothschild family. Baron Lambert was part of the Belgian branch of the Rothschild clan. The New York investment house of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which had a pivotal role in Kenneth Bialkin’s later corporate takeover schemes, was drawn into the Bronfman’s orbit.