Elly Kadoorie

Sir Eleazer "Elly" Silas Kadoorie KBE (1867 – 2 August 1944) was an Indian-born philanthropist and member of a wealthy family that had large business interests in the Far East.

Biography

His brother was Sir Ellis Kadoorie, and his sons are Sir Lawrence Kadoorie and Sir Horace Kadoorie. His family were originally Iraqi Jews from Baghdad who later migrated to Bombay (Mumbai), India in the mid-eighteenth century.

Elly 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. He became the largest shareholder when CLP was restructured in early 20th century. 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.

He was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1926 Birthday Honours. He became a naturalised British the following year.

In 1942, Kadoorie was taken away from his home in Shanghai and interned in a Japanese prison camp for foreign civilians. He died in prison in 1944.

Sir Elly Kadoorie's grave and that of his wife, Lady (Laura) Kadoorie, are located in the Song Qinglin Memorial Park near Hongqiao Road, Shanghai and is open to visitors. The tombstone of their grave is amongst only four Jewish Graves in Shanghai which remained intact and were not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.