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TARRYTOWN, N.Y. - Edgar M. Bronfman, the billionaire Seagram Company chair and philanthropist who summered with his family in Tarrytown, died Saturday in his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
Bronfman expanded his family’s liquor-based company and served as president of the World Jewish Congress, championing the rights of Jews everywhere, according to an obituary in The New York Times.
Bronfman inherited control of Seagram from his father, Samuel Bronfman, the Times reported. He "gave the company a more sophisticated image, in keeping with his own elegantly turned-out profile in New York society," according to his obituary.
As president of the World Jewish Congress, from 1981 until 2007, Bronfman turned a small federation of Jewish groups in 66 countries into a more focused, confrontational organization.
He was born in Montreal on June 20, 1929. He and his siblings spent summers at their country estate in Tarrytown and at the family retreat on Lake Placid in the Adirondacks.
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