Bernard Schreier

Bernard Schreier was born in 1918

Bernard Schreier was born in 1918 in Gösting, near Graz in Austria, to Hermann Schreier and Anna Kaswiner. His father was a textile merchant whose business failed in the 1920s. After the Nazi takeover of Austria, he was taken to Palestine with one of his sisters in 1939, and his parents later joined them.

During the Second World War he volunteered in the British Army. In 1948 he joined the new IDF Engineering Corps and served in the war that year, including work on the road to Eilat. He left the army in 1951.

After his release he worked as a mechanical engineer on roads and infrastructure and founded a construction company with 3 former engineering officers. He helped the IDF prepare for the 1956 Sinai campaign, then moved to England in 1957. There he founded CP Holdings, which refurbished and resold used heavy equipment and in 1977 bought an opencast mining business.

After the fall of communism he took over the Caterpillar dealership in Hungary and from 1995 held a large stake in Danubius Hotels Group, which he expanded across Eastern Europe. He was knighted in 2000 for developing trade between the UK and Hungary. In Israel he bought the Israel Tractor Company in 1989 and merged it with Zoko Group in 2001, which supplied engineering equipment, including D9 bulldozers, to the IDF. He died in 2013.