Leo Hirsch

Levi Hirsch was born on 27 April 1842 in Altena, in the Prussian Province of Westphalia, the son of Israël Hirsch, a cattle dealer and butcher, by his third marriage. Because of his good handwriting he first found work as a clerk on the railways. He then answered an advertisement from the Loewenstein firm in Aachen, where he was taken on as an apprentice, and studied for a school certificate that exempted him from military service. When Philipp Freudenberg, an employee of the Loewenstein firm who was related to the family by marriage, took over a shop in Elberfeld, Hirsch went with him.

There he became engaged to Freudenberg's sister Johanna. Her family sent her to Brussels to work for her brother-in-law Siegfried Loewenstein, and Hirsch followed her, finding a job with the tie merchant Hayem.

Hirsch, his wife and their five children, Régina, Arthur, Bertha, Ivan and Alice, lived on the second floor of the shop until 1886, when he bought the town house of the Count Goblet d'Alviella at the corner of the Rue Zinner and the Boulevard du Régent. Johanna Hirsch sat on the committee of a Brussels home for the elderly and was a member of a charitable loan society from 1871 to 1901. Their son Arthur Hirsch (1873–1933) wrote a short family history in 1929; his marriage to Clara Van Campenhout in 1895 was the first in the family outside the Jewish community.

Léo Hirsch died in Brussels on 15 January 1906 after a long illness. The Amsterdam firm's death notice called him its "highly esteemed friend, former partner and co-founder". He was buried on 17 January in the Jewish section of the Dieweg cemetery in Uccle, with his entire staff present. Three carriages were needed for the wreaths, and the Brussels newspaper L'Indépendance remembered him as a generous benefactor of his employees and the poor. In his funeral address, Armand Bloch quoted Hirsch's saying, "One must buy the right to be happy". His grave, in the Roman style, carries no religious symbols.

After his death the firm was run by two merchants from Hamburg until his grandsons were old enough to take over; one of them, Jean-Paul Hirsch, managed it from 1922 until it was wound up in 1962.