Although diminutive, she was tenacious in spirit and fostered deeply held ideas and a philosophical core that she acted upon resolutely, even if it meant carrying placards in the streets, writes SANDRA MARTIN

A citizen of three countries, philanthropist and art collector Andrea Bronfman once said, "I feel like the wandering Jew. My mother was American. My father was Scottish. My sister and I were born and brought up in England and we both married Canadians."

Wherever she was, though, she got involved in helping others. "She was not a celebrity trustee," William Thorsell, president of the Royal Ontario Museum said of her term as a director of the ROM from 1999 to 2003. "She was very passionate and filled with well researched and tough questions about our business plans. When she took something on you had to be on your toes. She was always demanding the best."

Tom Axworthy was executive-director of the CRB (Charles R. Bronfman) Foundation for 16 years. Ms. Bronfman was co-chairman. He quickly realized that meant reporting to each Bronfman separately. They approached issues differently, asked different kinds of questions and he learned he had to persuade them both to take on projects. Mr. Bronfman always wanted to know what "good" a project would achieve and she invariably asked: "Do you have the people to make it work?"

Among the many causes the Bronfmans have supported in Canada are Historica, the touring exhibition of A Coat of Many Colours that depicted Jewish history in Canada, and the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. "She was incredibly loyal and a real risk taker who came up with imaginative solutions," said Roger Bennett, senior vice president of Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies in New York.

After selling their large home in the Westmount area of Montreal in 1998, she and her husband divided their time between a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and a home in Jerusalem. They also kept a house in Palm Beach, Fla. In 2002, they were made honorary citizens of Israel in recognition of their cultural and artistic philanthropy.

"No one does anything if he doesn't get pleasure from it," Ms. Bronfman told the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz last July. "I really appreciate noble thoughts about pure philanthropy, but it doesn't work like that." Speaking on behalf of herself and her husband, she explained that they didn't like the Hebrew term nadvanut (benevolence) because it carried the whiff of charity. "Nadvanut is giving someone money and feeling good. We invest in people."

Andrea Brett Morrison (always called Andy) was a peace baby. She was born in London three weeks after VE Day in 1945, the younger daughter of Hyam (Scotty) Morrison and Doris (Kappel) Morrison. Her father, a Glaswegian, and her mother, a New Yorker, had met in Carlsbad, then a resort town in Czechoslovakia, a decade earlier. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force during the war and was posted to Canada.

After the defeat of Germany, the Morrisons moved to London where he became heavily involved in The Great Universal Stores Ltd (now called Gus plc.), a chain that, at its peak, numbered 250 branches. By the time Andy was five and her older sister Marcia (called Kappy) was 12, the family was prosperous enough to live in the Kensington area of London and to send their daughter to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Andy grew up in a family that was passionate about a Jewish homeland in Israel, philanthropy and the arts. Her father was a key volunteer in Britain's United Jewish Appeal, serving first as treasurer and then as chair, and her mother was an active supporter of London art exhibits and an early benefactor of the British Friends of the Israel Museum.

She met Charles Bronfman in Jerusalem at the opening of the Israel Museum in 1965, an institution that had been heavily endowed by both of their families. He was married to someone else and she was engaged to David Cohen, a clothing manufacturer from Montreal and a first cousin of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. She had met him through her sister Kappy, who was married to Montrealer Eric Flanders. Mr. Bronfman was one of the ushers at Andy's wedding at the Dorchester Hotel in London in 1966.

The Cohens settled in Montreal and eventually had three children, Jeremy, Pippa and Tony. Like her parents before her, she became a steadfast supporter of Israel. Historian Irving Abella, who had dinner with the Bronfmans at their apartment in New York last Friday evening, remembers her from the 1970s. "She was one of the founders of the Group of 35, a collection of Montreal Jewish Women who stood outside the Soviet Consulate in Montreal, day in and day, out protesting the Refusniks and demanding their release from Russia."

Although she was diminutive in size -- no more than 5 feet 2 inches in height -- she was tenacious in spirit. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Soviets were refusing to allow Jewish dissidents to emigrate, she mobilized the Jewish community in Montreal to put pressure on both Soviet diplomats and Canadian politicians to "let her people go," as Prof. Abella phrased it.

By then, her parents had settled in Israel. In 1969, the Morrisons made Jerusalem their second home. They bought a plot of land in the Talbiyeh section of Jerusalem and began planning the stone house that Andrea later inherited and where she and her husband lived when they were in Israel.

After they each divorced their spouses, she and Mr. Bronfman were married in 1982. He was 14 years her senior, an heir to the huge Seagram liquor fortune and owner of the Montreal Expos baseball team. Tom Axworthy was teaching at Harvard University in Boston when he received a phone call from Charles Bronfman in the mid-1980s inviting him to come to Montreal to talk about working for CRB, the family foundation. Rather than a job interview in an office, the Bronfmans invited Mr. Axworthy and his wife Roberta to dinner in their home. "I saw that pattern repeated many times," said Mr. Axworthy, who ended up working for CRB and its Historica projects, initially as vice-president and then executive-director and then as a director of Historica.

"She had an intuitive sense about people," he said. "She could detect a phony quicker than anybody I have ever met, and she wasn't intimidated by anybody."

As he got to know Ms. Bronfman, he appreciated her passion for Israel and her funny, down-to-earth manner. He also quickly realized that behind her cultured demeanour was a woman with deeply held ideas and a philosophical core that she acted upon, even if it meant carrying placards in the streets. Prof. Abella, co-author of None is Too Many, and a former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, wrote the book that accompanied the A Coat of Many Colours exhibition. "It was significant for Canadian Jewry because it told the story that nobody knew, how far back Jews have been in Canada. It contained artifacts going back 250 years," said Prof. Abella. "She did it, she founded it, she thought about it she created it, she raised the funds for it -- a one-woman effort."

Ms. Bronfman had a whimsical taste in art, according to Mr. Abella. "She funded and supported folk art -- really off the wall stuff. She loved the masters but she also had a great collection of pottery that would make you smile to see it."

"I travelled with her for 10 days in 2002," said William Thorsell president of the Royal Ontario Museum. She was on the selection committee that eventually chose Daniel Libeskind to design the Renaissance ROM, the museum's current expansion, and she took the decision-making so seriously that she insisted on looking at all of the buildings created by the final three contenders.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Ms. Bronfman founded and served as deputy chair of the Gift of New York, a program that gave free admission to cultural and sporting events for families of the victims.

Birthright Israel is a program that the Bronfmans founded in 2000 with Michael and Judy Steinhardt, to boost cultural understanding and knowledge about Israel. So far, close to 90,000 young Jews, aged 18 to 26, from 45 countries have been sent on a free 10-day trip to Israel. Definitely hands-on patrons, the Bronfmans enrolled in a local language school so that they could simulate the immigrant experience.

AIDA, the Association of Israel's Decorative Arts, was started in 2002 after the second Palestinian uprising or intifada made it difficult for American collectors to visit artists in Israel. Working with American collectors Dale and Doug Anderson, Ms. Bronfman organized decorative artists in Israel and arranged for their work to be shown at the International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (SOFA). The largest art exposition in the United States, SOFA is held twice a year in New York and once in Chicago.

Last year, in recognition of her love of glass and ceramics, Mr. Bronfman endowed the Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for the Arts, known as "the Andy" as a 60th birthday gift for his wife. The annual prize gives an Israeli decorative artist a cash award worth about $12,000 and the opportunity to stage an exhibition at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

Most recently, Ms. Bronfman was working on organizing a folk-art festival in Israel from her office in New York. On Monday, she was returning from an early morning walk in Central Park when she slipped as she was crossing East 65th Street, half a block from her home. She was struck in the intersection by a limousine and was rushed unconscious to hospital.

Andrea M. Bronfman was born

in London, England, on May 30,

1945. She died in Presbyterian/

Weill Cornell Medical Centre in

New York on Monday during

surgery for multiple internal

injuries. She was 60. She is sur-

vived by her husband Charles

Bronfman, three children, two

stepchildren and their families.

She also leaves her sister Marcia.

The funeral is being held this

morning at Congregation B'nai

Jeshurun in Manhattan with

burial in Jerusalem on Friday.