Still convinced that either he or the machine was hallucinating, he showed it to the woman behind the counter.

“She looks at it and says, ‘I think you won the jackpot,’ and tried to hug me. I’m like, ‘I’m Jewish and we don’t do that.’”

Only then did he scratch the rest of the card and study it carefully. That’s when it hit him.

“I saw the 11, and under it, ‘LIFE.’ That means $10,000 a week for life. Obviously, Uncle Sam gets most of it,” he adds wryly.

The first person he called, of course, was his wife. Still standing there with a ticket he was half-convinced couldn’t be real, he told her they’d won, really won, only to be met with the kind of skepticism reserved for husbands who’ve made that kind of joke in the past.

“In the past, I’ve told her that I won the lottery when it was only a 5-dollar scratch-off,” he admits.

She didn’t buy it until he sent photographic proof, and even then the disbelief lingered, the kind that mixes awe, confusion and the dawning suspicion that life has just taken a very unexpected turn.

“She didn’t know what to say or do, and neither did I. When I’d buy a ticket here and there, I figured I’d win $100, maybe $500; I don’t even buy the Powerball or Mega Millions because I know how unrealistic winning that ticket is. So I was in total disbelief. I’d be happy if I won $40.” In fact, he says, had the first ticket been a $40 win he wouldn’t have considered purchasing a second one.

What was the rest of the day like?

“I was actually on my way to run a chasunah, at the time. Chasunahs are a very hard thing to do. But this particular one… my mashgiach in the kitchen realized something was going on and he overheard me, so I told him to keep it quiet. But I pulled through. After it all, this was still someone’s chasunah. I was holding onto that ticket like a mother holding onto a brand-new baby.”

Lump Sum or Lifetime?

After the shock wore off, he faced the first of many adulting-level decisions you never expect to confront while standing in a Chinese-owned 99-cent store. Do you take the lifetime payout or grab the lump sum and hope you don’t mess it up?

“The next day we went down to claim the ticket, which was probably a mistake. I should’ve probably called a lawyer, a tax adviser. And that’s when they took the picture.” He says if he wins again (and who knows what the odds of that happening are) he’ll do things differently.

“If I would’ve done it through an LLC it would’ve been different, but I didn’t know, and once they took the picture there was no choice.” He learned the hard way that if you don’t set up an LLC before the claim, the state posts your photo whether you like it or not. If he’d set up an LLC before claiming the ticket, the state would have been required to list the company as the winner instead of “Suchy Klein from Flatbush.”

According to what he was told, choosing the yearly payments would have translated into about $320,000 a year, guaranteed for at least 20 years, and continuing as long as he lived and the lottery existed. If something happened to him earlier, his family would still receive 20 years of payments.

On paper, it sounds like security. In real life, it sounded like pressure.

“A lot of people were telling me, ‘Take the yearly option, you get guaranteed money,’” he says. “But I knew the anxiety would kill me. Back and forth, every year, thinking about tax brackets, wondering if the rules have changed.”

So he ran the numbers and while taking a lump sum would yield $2 million less in the long run, he figured that if he’d invest that lump sum properly, over 20 years it could result in profits greater than $2 million. “It’s a lot of money, but if you talk to the right people and you do it right, it can become something much bigger.”

And that’s how he landed on the lump sum, choosing to take $10 million in cash now (which comes out to around $4.3 million after tax) instead of the government-sized eye-dropper over decades. And that’s when he discovered that winning is only the beginning.

Twelve Weeks of Waiting

In the least climactic plot twist imaginable, you do not walk out of a convenience store holding a suitcase full of cash, flanked by a pair of security guards wearing sunglasses and earpieces, while a live orchestra is blasting “Yamim al yemei.” The funny thing about winning the lottery in real life is that the most valuable thing you’ve ever held in your hand looks exactly like the receipt you get when you return batteries. That, plus a rapidly intensifying knot in your stomach.

Klein officially won on September 16, triggering the New York State’s robust verification process. Because before the shidduch between a lottery winner and the IRS can be sealed with an official l’chayim, the State insists on acting as the shadchan, running background checks like they’re confirming yichus, eligibility, and whether the kallah (your bank account) is emotionally prepared. They conduct investigations on the ticket, the store, the buyer and any possible the possible partners. (For example, they want to confirm you’re not a 75-year-old man secretly declaring your 21-year-old grandson as the winner.) This means the money wouldn’t hit his account for about 12 weeks.

“If someone wins like $50,000, they can pick it up much quicker,” he explains. “But when it’s a jackpot like this, they investigate everything. They check the store where you bought it, whether you bought it with anyone else, if you owe money, all that. You’re always worried they’ll find some way not to give it to you.”

By week six, he admits, he was calling them constantly.

“They stopped asking my claim number, that’s how well they knew me,” he laughs. “I’d call every day. I was so anxious.”

When the transfer was finally scheduled, he barely slept.

“I literally stayed up the whole night waiting for it to enter the account,” he says. “Baruch Hashem, it did.”

He went away to the Dominican Republic for a few days, a trip he’d actually booked before he knew the timeline of the payout. At some point, he put his phone down for half an hour. When he picked it up, his private dream had become very, very public. State rules say the picture goes out only once the check clears, so the second the money arrived, the mazel tov photo went out, too.

“My phone was bombarded,” he says. “People from Israel, Australia, London, even Hong Kong. People I haven’t heard from in years. I thought someone had the wrong number. Then someone sent me a screenshot with my picture.”

And from there it just exploded. Those calls are pretty much as we’d imagine.

“A million people asked me for money. One person even asked for money so he could buy lottery tickets. There were plenty of people making fun… it was one crazy day.”

Still Showing Up to Work

The morning the news broke, before he became a household name for 24 hours, his WhatsApp status carried something far more on-brand.

“It’s funny, yesterday morning, before this whole thing blew up, I posted a fundraiser for my kids’ school. In the first few hours, three hundred people viewed it and three people donated. A few hours later, more than 5,000 people had viewed it, which helped greatly with the fundraiser.”

If you think a $10,000-a-week-for-life jackpot means instant retirement, Suchy Klein is not your stereotype. He works at a community wedding hall, Ateres Mattel Leah, which offers beautiful, significantly discounted weddings for families who can’t afford six-figure simchahs.

“One of my bosses called right away: ‘Are you coming to the wedding on Monday? Do I need a replacement?’ I told him, ‘Nope, I’ll be there.’”

“Ateres Mattel Leah is a takanah hall that helps people make weddings,” he says. “What they do is unbelievable, and not because I work there. You see people who really can’t afford to make a wedding, and they get this beautiful event.”

He names the wedding hall and Chasdei Lev — which helps rebbeim before Yamim Tovim and throughout the year — as two organizations whose work speaks to him on a personal level, and to which he’s happy to divert some ma’aser funds. “Also Bonei Olam and ATime,” he adds, “for what they do to bring Yiddishe children into Klal Yisrael.”

He also teaches at a special-needs boys’ school and is deeply involved in various other tzedakah causes, which he left unnamed. None of that, he insists, is changing. Quitting simply isn’t on his radar.

“I’m a workaholic. That’s who I am,” he says. “I’m forty-five, I have a life to live. I promised myself that for at least the next two years, I’m not quitting anything. Maybe after that I’ll cut down on one job, maybe cut a few hours off in the morning. But work is important to me.”

What will change? The pressure.

“The goal was always to buy a house,” he says. “My car right now is basically on three wheels. This will make life easier on the family. But I’m not going on a fancy spree. If this was $400 million, maybe I’d think differently. This is a big brachah, but you can’t let it change your whole life. I told my son: It’s very nice and it’s helpful, but you can’t let it change your life. Winning the lottery has ruined a lot of people.”

The Fear of Becoming a Statistic

Klein is well aware of the stereotype of lottery winners whose lives spiral out of control.

“I’ve seen those stories,” he says. “People win big and then regret it. I don’t want to be that guy.”

His natural temperament helps. He’s not a spender. He doesn’t dream about sports cars or private jets.

“I don’t need a 2026 BMW,” he says. “A 2023 Camry is perfect for me and my family. We’re simple people. Every Shabbos, my wife and I host singles and divorcees. I lot of people come to our house for meals. They’re not coming for lamb chops and ribs. They come because they enjoy the company. I plan for my life to continue the way it is. We definitely want to purchase a home, I want to set up a retirement plan, I want to give tzedakah, and I want my children to, im yirtzeh Hashem, have a yerushah.”

Still, he’s blunt about one mistake he feels he made: not getting professional advice before claiming the ticket.

“If I could redo one part, I’d reach out to a financial advisor first,” he says. “Then the advisor would connect me to a lawyer. Not just to protect me, but to protect the money; how to structure it, where to put it, maybe open an LLC.” When you’ve never dealt with this kind of money, you really don’t know what you don’t know.

Since then, he has hired both an attorney and a financial advisor. He’s also been approached by serious members of the Flatbush community, people he describes as “high-end, very ehrlich” who have offered to sit with him and make sure no one takes advantage.

Before winning the lottery, Klein had an interesting track record with raffles. One of his earliest “victories” came in Camp Ma Navu, where the big prize was actually a punishment: the waiter selected to serve the families, “the shift no one wants because families don’t tip.” He won that one.

Years later he upgraded slightly, winning a sheitel in a raffle from an organization whose name he no longer remembers. His biggest legitimate win pre-lottery was a yeshivah raffle for a trip to Eretz Yisrael.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of lottery winners who lost themselves long before they lost the money. Klein seems intent on being an exception. Though it may change his finances, he’s determined that this win will not rewrite his priorities, his schedule or his sense of who he is, and that he won’t forget the life he had long before the numbers lined up. He knows the Source of his windfall and he knows where it needs to go.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1089)