Jack Smorgon AO, a Foundation Member of the Carltonians, long-serving Member of the Carlton Coterie and Life Member of the Carlton Football Club, has died at the age of 89.
Smorgon’s lifelong connection with the football club can be sourced to the family’s territorial clinks with the suburb - for it was in 1927, within a year of the family’s arrival in Port Melbourne from what is now Ukraine on a converted cattle ship - that his grandfather Norman (Naum) and Norman’s brothers Moses and Abram Smorgon established a kosher butcher shop at 366 Lygon Street – a shop that would serve the community for four decades, albeit under various ownerships.
Carlton’s 1968 Premiership player and former CEO and President Ian Collins AM, remembered Smorgon as “a great fellow who was loyal to Carlton all his life”.
“Jack was low-key in his approach, but he always supported the Club,” Collins said.
Smorgon was a cousin of fellow Carlton Life Member and former No.1 male ticketholder the late Sam Smorgon AO - a former Director of the Carlton Cricket & Football Social Club who first mooted the fundraising concept of the Peter Mac Cup, and whose son Graham Smorgon AM served as Carlton President through 2006.
Long-time acquaintance and former Carlton Director George Varlamos, who attended Smorgon’s funeral on Monday, said that he recommended his “dapper, well-groomed” friend for Life Membership in 1997 “and that recommendation was endorsed unanimously”.
“He was a respected member of the Carlton community, the Jewish community and the wider community,” Varlamos said.
From the time he left school until the Carlton Premiership year of 1995, Smorgon was an active participant in the family’s enormous industrial enterprise. For years he oversaw both its meat division and formidable philanthropic activities.
The business, when broken up in that same year, was valued at $1.5billion. It spanned meat, paper, chemicals, plastics, electronics and steel, and had involved four generations of Smorgon family members across eight decades.
In 1995, the Escor Group, which traced its operational roots to the Smorgon family enterprises that began back in ’27, was founded to serve as the family office for the Jack and Robert Smorgon families. Smorgon acted as director and chaired the Jack & Robert Smorgon Families Foundation.
Smorgon was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 1998 Australia Day Honours.
Eight years later, he was elevated to an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) “for service to the community through philanthropy and support for a broad range of organisations including Jewish community and health and welfare groups; and to promoting economic development in Australia”.
In May 2017, the prestigious Goldstein Prize for Distinguished Leadership was conferred on Smorgon “in tribute to the exceptional leadership and dedication to the State of Israel and the Jewish people he demonstrated in his brilliant, decades-long career”.
Jack Smorgon AO is survived by his wife Val and four children, together with grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Both Carlton's AFL and AFLW sides will wear black armbands in tribute to him when they take to the field for their double header against St Kilda at Marvel Stadium this Sunday night.
