Shaul Eisenberg

Shaul Eisenberg was born in 1921 in Munich

Shaul Eisenberg was born in Munich in 1921 to a religious Jewish family from Poland. After the Nazis came to power he fled as a refugee and reached Shanghai in 1940. He moved on to Harbin and then to Japan, where he married in 1941.

In Japan he founded the Eisenberg Group and traded in iron, steel and machinery. From the 1950s he expanded to South Korea, linking its government with Western firms such as Siemens and Fiat. The South Korean government gave him an award for this work.

He first visited Israel in 1952 and received Israeli citizenship. In 1967 Pinhas Sapir initiated the Eisenberg Law, which gave tax breaks to multinational companies active in Israel, and Eisenberg moved his international business there. He invested in Israel Corporation and gained full control of it in 1984.

From the 1970s he worked in China and brokered Israeli arms sales to its military. In 1979 he flew an Israeli defense delegation to Beijing in his private plane. He died in Beijing in 1997, and his son continued the family business.