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Paul Moshe
Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930. in his youth, he and his family were taken up in the
turnmoil of World War 11, and they escaped from Austria, to Paris, London and Tangier.
The Reichmanns were all-time activists for the Jewish people. From Tangier where they
had finally settled, fleeing the Nazis, Samuel and Renche, Paul's parents, managed
to save thousands of Jewish lives, during the darkest hours of the Holocaust. After
the war, Paul studied in various yeshivot: Gateshead, in England, Ponovetz and Mir in
Eretz Israel.
In 1953, Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz called him from Yeshivat Mir, to become the Educational Director of Ozar Hatorah in Morocco. With Moses Lasry, a young engineer who shared his ideas and ideals, and Rabbi Aaron Monsonego, the young principal of the 1,000 student Talmud Torah in Casablanca, Paul Reichmann overhauled the organization's religious curriculum and upgraded its teaching staff, travelling all over Morocco and helping to establish tens of schools for thousands of children, among them the first girl's seminary in Tangier. In 1955, in Montreux he married Lea Feldman, to whom he had been engaged from the age of 15. in mid-1956, he resigned from Ozar Hatorah, and sailed to New York. From there, Paul left for Toronto where, after a few years, most of the Reichmann family gathered together.
In 1964, the Reichmann brothers: Albert, Paul and Ralph, established Olympia and York Industrial Development Company, which, at its peak, constituted the greatest real estate empire the world had ever seen. Two sentences could express the Reichmann's way of doing business: "Their edge was their integrity" and "Their word was their bond". The Reichmanns were one of the ten wealthiest families in the world, ranking just below the British Royal family in the 1980s. However, the Reichmanns resisted assimilation and never modified their strict adherence to Jewish Law. Paul Reichmann has been at the same time one of the most resourceful and resilient enterpreneurs of the 20th century and also a strict observant Jew, leading a rigorously devout, modest private life. With his brothers, revered by their orthodox peers, they created and supported an infrastructure of schools, yeshivot, synagogues, kollelim and other institutions, locally and all over the world, which will last for many generations. |
