Miami Jewish Federation, and is a Past President of Temple Beth Sholom. He was the major contributor that enabled the relocation of the Nova University Shepard Broad School of Law to the university’s main campus. Barry University named their performing arts center in honor of Shepard and Ruth and renamed their planned giving society to The Shepard Broad Society to honor him for his vision and commitment to higher education. He also created the Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Research Foundation at Duke University in the late 1980s to honor the memory of his wife, Ruth, and to advance the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases – particularly Alzheimer’s disease. Amidst all of his accomplishments Shepard said that “working secretly for Israel was the important thing he ever did.” In 1945, Broad received a top-secret letter from the American Zionist leader Rudolf Sonneborn. Sonneborn had agreed with David Ben Gurion — who would become Israel’s first prime minister — to organize a group of American men who could help Jews in Palestine form a Jewish state. “My grandfather was one of those men,” said John Bussel, Shepard’s grandson, and President of the Shepard Broad Foundation. The group convened just once, in Sonneborn’s New York apartment. “Ben Gurion was there, and would later say that the State of Israel was born in that meeting,” Bussel said. “The Jews of Europe had lost everything. The only ones who could help were in America.” Broad raised funds to buy two American cargo ships, and docked them in the Miami River. He told authorities they would sail to South America to bring bananas back to the United States. “What they really did was head east and pick up
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