The Canadian billionaire businessman who lobbied the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate and helped spearhead the search for artwork and other hidden treasures stolen by the Nazis has died.  Edgar Bronfman was 84.

Bronfman ran his family Seagram liquor empire, building the brand for three decades until it was sold to French media and telecom group Vivendi Universal in 2000.  But his most significant contributions were made as the head of the World Jewish Congress, an umbrella group of Jewish advocacy organizations.  He was open about how wealth and power gave him access to world leaders.

“It's a combination of the two,” Bronfman said in 1986.  “In the end, it doesn't really matter why that access is available, as long as it is there.”

When the Nazis rolled across most of Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s, they stripped Jews of their possessions, artwork, and even the gold fillings from their teeth.  Much of the wealth was squirreled away in Swiss banks.  Under Bronfman’s leadership, the World Jewish Congress during the 1980s and ‘90s helped lead the effort to gain $11 billion in restitution for heirs of Holocaust victims.

In the 1980s, Bronfman’s contacts with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev opened the gates for increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

US President Bill Clinton in 199 awarded Bronfman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, for work “to ensure basic rights for Jews around the world.”