Billionaire Elie Horn has set the bar high. Fighting the battle against assimilation is not enough, he says. He has plans to win the war

HIS WAY “When you do your mission you will find the tools to do the job. G-d doesn’t want to make our lives easy by definition. He decided this is His way.” (Photos: Shlomi Cohen)

E

ight years ago, Bill and Melinda Gates challenged the world’s billionaires to donate 50% or more of their wealth to charity. Since then, 174 billionaires have signed onto “The Giving Pledge,” including Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg. Only one member of this select group plans to donate half of his wealth to reverse the tide of assimilation that has devastated the Jewish world in the last two centuries. His name is Elie Horn and he’s set the bar high. Fighting the battle is not enough, he says. He has plans to win the war

Elie Horn invites me to join him at the dining room table in his spacious but unpretentious Jerusalem apartment, where he proceeds to offer me a selection of cakes. Gripped with indecision, as it’s too close to lunchtime and they all contain far too many calories for my diet, Mr. Horn makes the choice for me, carving a generous slice from a chocolate babka.

It hadn’t taken me long to gather that Elie Horn is both a gracious host and someone you try not to say no to, so I said the brachah and dug in as we started talking between bites. There was little time to lose: Elie Horn rarely grants interviews and he was rushing to catch a plane to his home base of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

A self-made real estate magnate, Elie Horn’s self-appointed mission is to fight assimilation and save Jewish lives. He contributes an estimated $100 million each year of his billion-dollar fortune, most of which goes to Olami, a global community comprised of more than 300 organizations in 28 countries that provides funding, leadership, and guidance primarily to campus outreach organizations. With more than 2,000 people working in 11 different languages under the Olami framework worldwide, Mr. Horn provides the opportunity for more than 40,000 students each year on 600 college campuses to engage with a Torah mentor. Olami estimates more than 250,000 college-age students have attended its programs over the past ten years and each year, well over 2,000 of them become fully Shabbos observant.

Elie Horn is a man who makes things happen

When he speaks, his voice is filled with conviction and his commitment to Yiddishkeit comes across in big ideas and powerful themes. Eternity. G-d’s decrees. The power of Torah to change lives.

“I speak only about spirituality,” Mr. Horn tells me. “You have a Jewish soul? You want to live for eternity?”

Explaining why he chose to devote his fortune to fight assimilation he says it was simple. “I’m a Jew and I have an obligation to preserve my people. It needs to be done.”

Calling All Generals 

Elie Horn’s story is one of rags to riches. His parents left Aleppo, Syria in the 1950s and had lost all their money by the time they arrived in Brazil. An enterprising youth, he began buying and selling real estate at age 19, partnering with his brother. In less than ten years, he became a multimillionaire.

By the 1970s, economists were already citing Brazil’s “economic miracle.” Elie Horn experienced his own wonders. He founded Cyrela Brazil Realty in 1978, which soon became the largest publicly traded developer of high-end residential buildings in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities. Cyrela’s share price has risen 30 times in value since its initial public offering and has a market value of $6 billion on the Brazilian stock exchange.

In 2010, Forbes ranked Elie Horn as the world’s 437th wealthiest man. For comparison’s sake, Forbes’ 2017 list rates a fellow named Donald Trump in 544th place.

But Elie Horn doesn’t measure success by his net worth or the size of his office. That’s not how he counts his blessings. He’s no stranger to 16-hour work days, but if he sacrifices his sleep, it’s to weep over lost Jewish souls. He earmarks the bulk of his tzedakah money to battle assimilation through the work of Olami.

Olami member organizations such as Meor, JAM and Aish HaTorah, along with RAJE and Emet in the New York area, all work with Olami, sending their young leaders to Jewish communities around the world.

Four days prior to my meeting with Mr. Horn, he addressed a group of some 100 rabbis in training at Jerusalem’s Ner LeElef’s headquarters who will soon join the other 1,200 Ner LeElef couples already in the field. Ner LeElef is Olami’s training program for educators around the world and sends out an average of 130 new couples to the front lines each year.

“I want generals. I don’t want soldiers,” Mr. Horn told the group. “There are lot of soldiers in the world. If you have generals you can win the fight and change the world. I want someone with conviction who will fight and win, and for whom the word no does not exist.”

But there’s another underlying reason why he has adopted the fight against assimilation as his number one cause.

He almost fell into that trap himself, as a young, wealthy man, when every conceivable temptation of the world was open to him. He used his freedom of choice to choose G-d. But it was a close call, as he confided to the Ner LeElef group: “I was going to get married myself to a goyah when I was 28 years old.”

Five Tough Hours

“I’m the first guy who found him and brought him back to life,” says Rabbi Shabtai Alperin, Chabad’s shaliach in Sao Paulo since 1961 and still spry and working hard at age 80.

Before he opened Sao Paulo’s Chabad house, Rabbi Alperin was principal of the Beit Chinuch day school, then known as Lavne.

“One day, a young woman from the Syrian Sephardic community comes into my office. She was the mother of some students in the school,” says Rabbi Alperin. The woman showed him a book and asked if it was “kosher” reading material.

“I was shocked, in a positive way, because 60 years ago, rabbis didn’t get such questions,’ Rabbi Alperin said.

When the woman told Rabbi Alperin she was in the process of becoming religious, he offered to start a weekly Torah class for her and other like-minded school mothers. That woman is Mirella Shammah, Elie Horn’s sister. (Mrs. Shammah is in her nineties today and lives in Jerusalem.)

It was through Mirella that Rabbi Alperin first met Elie Horn. She was worried about her brother and she arranged the introduction.

“We hit it off very well, me and Mr. Horn, and he asked me to come to his office three times a week,” Rabbi Alperin says.

For Elie Horn, that was quite a commitment at a time when his real estate business was in high gear.

Horn had hit upon an ingenious method to profit quickly from the real estate market, buying apartments and land with little money down, and then flipping them for a profit before the bill came due. For instance, if he bought an apartment for $10,000, he would offer the seller the following terms: a $1,000 cash down payment, $3,000 in 90 days and the remainder of $6,000 in 36 months.

“I didn’t have the money, so I wanted to buy and sell it during the 90 days rather than pay the $3,000,” Mr. Horn said. “That was easy to do at the time, so we did it.”

Mr. Horn adapted the same conservative, low-money down strategy to land purchases. Once he bought the land, he would try to sell it at a quick profit to a builder.

If the builder didn’t have the cash, Mr. Horn would accept an apartment in the development at cost price in lieu of cash. He would then resell that apartment — sometimes to the builder himself — before his second payment came due.

“I succeeded in making $100,000 by the age of 25 and $25 million by the age of 29,” Mr. Horn says. “Money was quick for me.”

It was this hectic schedule that Rabbi Alperin squeezed his way into. “He kept crazy hours. I had to be there at 7:30 in the morning and I always had to rush over after davening that ended at 7:10 or 7:20,” Rabbi Alperin recalls.

They were learning together for a year when Mr. Horn confided in him.

“He told me about this non-Jewish girl in his life,” Rabbi Alperin recalls.

Rabbi Alperin retorted with all the classic arguments, none of which budged Mr. Horn.

As the relationship got more serious, with talk of a wedding, Rabbi Alperin and Elie Horn eventually had it out.

“We had a real tough conversation, for a few hours in the hallway of the school one Sunday morning, raising our voices,” Rabbi Alperin said. “I explained to him it was very wrong, he’s a Jew, and a Kohein and I talked to him about his neshamah. It was still all the classical arguments. I didn’t say anything new, but he had great respect for me and finally, he listened.”

Mr. Horn broke off the relationship with the girl, but not with Rabbi Alperin, who had the honor of being mesader kiddushin at Mr. Horn’s wedding to his wife Susy. The Horns are proud parents of three young men with strong yeshivah backgrounds.

This was the major turning point in Elie Horn’s life. He’s shared it on rare occasions, and one of them was with the Ner LeElef group. “I didn’t know what G-d was then. Maybe G-d was this piece of wood or some invention of people?

“It took me 20 years, but it began right after my non-marriage. I began to understand who

G-d is and what Judaism is. I realized the truth, and that if it happened to me, my mission was to fight this and to help other people avoid it.”

Exhorting this group of young kiruv rabbis to disseminate the truth broadly, Mr. Horn hammered his point home. “G-d is not something abstract. G-d is real. When you convince them about Judaism, and that it came from Sinai and from G-d and to be Jewish is a decree from G-d, then it’s no longer a choice.”

Money: A Test from G-d 

Having made his personal choice, and armed with a small fortune, Mr. Horn sought advice on how to use his resources wisely.

Rabbi David Weitman, an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe to Brazil since 1979, and currently chief rabbi of Sao Paulo’s Beit Yaacov Synagogue, took Mr. Horn to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe. After describing his tzedakah projects, Mr. Horn asked the rebbe what he could do to hasten the coming of Mashiach.

“You should see that your friends give tzedakah like you do,” the rebbe told Mr. Horn.

The advice worked.

Rabbi Weitman says Mr. Horn has had an influence on many people who weren’t used to giving such large sums. “He has a very strong belief in Mashiach and would like to see a different world,” says Rabbi Weitman. “He believes the world will change and everyone has to do his part and he understands his part.”

As Mr. Horn told the Ner LeElef group: “It was a test from G-d to know what to do with the money. If I used it for pleasure, to buy a boat and plane, that would be one thing, but I didn’t think that was my mission.”

And men like Rabbi Alperin knew just how to put Mr. Horn to the test.

The two men kept up their chavrusah for about a year after Mr. Horn’s marriage, and Mr. Horn became a donor to Chabad. In those days, the Sao Paulo Chabad House was renting a small facility, with limited activities centered around a Shabbos afternoon youth program.

One Shabbos afternoon, Mr. Horn attended the Seudah Shelishis.

After Havdalah, Mr. Horn told Rabbi Alperin how much he enjoyed the experience and asked if he could do more.

Rabbi Alperin answered the question with a question. “I said ‘Before I tell you, I want you to tell me what you liked about it. The singing? The speeches? The herring?’ ”

Elie Horn told Rabbi Alperin how impressed he was by how all the boys lined up to wash their hands, and how each one used his own, clean, tiny hand towel, and tossed it into a basket when they were done.

“I never thought that religious people were so clean!” said Rabbi Alperin, recalling Eli Horn’s response word for word.

Now Rabbi Alperin was ready to make the ask. “I said, ‘Now I’ll tell you what I want. Across the street, there is a house for sale. I want you to buy it for us.’

“We walked across street and rang the bell. I was praying the owner would answer. He didn’t for a long time. We were about to give up, then the guy opened a door from upstairs, and I said to him, ‘Please come down quickly.’ He and Mr. Horn agreed on a price on the spot. Monday morning, he paid $100,000 cash for it and we started a new phase in our lives,” Rabbi Alperin said.

Think About Others

In his address at Ner LeElef, Mr. Horn noted the value of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s vision in dispatching shluchim around the world and has adapted that battle plan in his war on assimilation.

“There are 100,000 Jewish students on campus in universities in North America,” Mr. Horn said. “How much does it cost to teach a student in universities? Hundreds of thousands of dollars… and they are the elite. We need to go to campuses to teach scientists, professors and teachers, to become Jews and remain Jews.

“The Jewish nation is not like the Americans or Chinese or Japanese,” he adds. “The Jewish soul comes directly from G-d. You cannot change it. You can change your passport, but you can’t change your soul.”

Elie Horn’s brief remarks were followed by a lively, give and take, with Mr. Horn leading them on.

“What’s your mission?” he asked one young man.

“To help as many people as I can,” he answered.

“How?”

“By being real”

“What do you mean to be real?”

“By leading by example and taking my learning and being able to give it over.”

“How will you serve the Jewish nation better?”

“By being a better Jew?”

“Only you?”

“By being a better Jew myself I can advise other people.”

“The way to be a better Jew is not to think about yourself, it’s to think about others. We will be judged upstairs by our negligence, or if we are weak or selfish. We have an obligation to bring Jewish people back to life. In my opinion that is the most important thing in life.”

It made an impact.

Simcha Lustig, a talmid at Aish HaTorah who joined the Ner LeElef program six months ago, was impressed by Mr. Horn’s strong and unwavering words. “What was especially inspiring was to see someone using his kochos and his money properly and how Hashem rewards him and pays him back.”

And Moshe Shmuel Carr, who has been with Ner LeElef for a year and half, was impressed by Mr. Horn’s offer of $100,000 to anyone who presented him with a great new idea for a project.

“Here’s a man, who on a drop of a dime, is willing to give you a ton of money,” Carr said.  That inspired me to think that all that’s holding us back from doing more is that people haven’t thought of more creative ways to do these things. Now I see the resources are there if you have a plan or a strategy.”

Endless Dreamers 

Elie Horn’s lead strategist today is Rabbi David Markowitz. Mr. Horn hired him two years ago as Olami’s chief operating officer at its Manhattan headquarters.

Rabbi Markowitz, who compiled 14 years of experience in the kiruv world with Aish HaTorah, JAM, and Ner LeElef, got a sense of the real Elie Horn — a man who sets achievable goals and doesn’t make impossible demands — when he flew to Brazil to accept the job.

Mr. Horn challenged Rabbi Markowitz to devise a plan based on a whopping $5 billion budget. He further told him that raising that huge amount would be “simple.”

“I asked, ‘What part of that is simple,?’ ” said Rabbi Markowitz.

“He said it should be a ten-year plan, and we need $500 million a year, and ten people who will each give $50 million a year. It’s no problem, let’s go.

“He challenged me to go out there and think big and not be limited by the things most people are limited by,” said Rabbi Markowitz, who added that Mr. Horn is very much a hands-on leader. He visits many of the locations around the world, which is not easy at his age, Rabbi Markowitz says.

As in his business life, Mr. Horn works from morning until night, meeting with mekarvim, students, and organizational leaders to listen to their stories, understand their programming, and find the most effective ways to inspire young Jews. He also personally reviews the monthly reports of each Olami organization, asking detailed questions of staff.

One of the first projects that Mr. Horn and Rabbi Markowitz initiated was a global summit attended by 1,000 people from 28 countries in Brazil in November 2016.

As a follow-up project, Olami sponsored a “shark tank” type of competition where potential donors and community leaders listened to presentations from 60 different groups of students from all over the world. Forty of those groups went back home with a total of $583,000 in pledges to start new initiatives in their home cities.

Two months ago, Olami delegates spent four days in Spain and Gibraltar exploring their Jewish heritage before heading to England for another four days to share ideas for “start-up” outreach projects and a Shabbaton.

Elie Horn’s guiding philosophy, Rabbi Markowitz says, is to be an endless dreamer when it comes to the destiny of the Jewish people. “He believes that all the Jewish people are going to come back and that we shouldn’t be limited by the challenges and what most people would see as obstacles. With Hashem’s help, we can succeed.”

The Price of Success

The alternative to winning isn’t just losing, it’s doom.

The Holocaust decimated the ranks of the Jewish people from nearly 17 million to just 11 million. Had the Jewish population grown from that 11-million figure by even 2 percent compounded in the succeeding 73 years, there would be close to 47 million Jews in the world, instead of the estimated 14 million.

Mr. Horn, and many demographers, attribute much of that lost potential to assimilation.

“We don’t have a bigger problem than this,” he says.

Interviewed on video for a staff summit last year at Olami’s New York headquarters, Mr. Horn said his goal was to reverse the tide of assimilation so that the numbers of Jewish people start to grow again. “I would like to see 50 million Jews in 2050 and not go down to 8 or 9 million.”

When committed Jews speak to the uncommitted, he says, they should put commitment to G-d and religion at the center of the conversation, something that is a greater challenge in America and Europe where growing numbers view religion as an infringement on their freedoms.

“That’s very dangerous trend,” Mr. Horn said. “We are humans, we are not animals. Humans have a conscience. If we don’t talk about religion and G-d, we are going to become proud and if we become proud we’re going to get away from the rules, and that will be the end.” Asked, at Ner LeElef, how much sacrifice he expects young rabbanim to make in this quest, Mr. Horn reflected on his own life experiences.

“I began my life with nothing. I worked 16 hours a day without food but with a lot of mazel. I worked those 16 hours a day, six days a week, for 30 to 40 years. [For this] I repent and I don’t repent. It’s a price for success.”

He measures that success by his family.

“I have three boys, thank G-d, very well-educated. They’re bnei yeshivot and they are very respectful.”

Returning to the topic of self-sacrifice, Mr. Horn said it depends on your will to win.

“If you want to win you will win — but you must pay the price. You don’t pay the price staying in the house watching television. The problem is accommodation, the laziness. When you do your mission you will find the tools to do the job. G-d doesn’t want to make our lives easy by definition. He decided this is His way.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 698)