Photos: Yeshivah and Family archives

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frum person strolling through the Hancock Park/La Brea section of Los Angeles will feel quite at home. There are shuls, kollelim, kosher restaurants, groceries, and a bookstore. But 60 years ago, none of this existed. The Jewish infrastructure of the City of Angels was created in large part by a scrappy, determined group of war-wounded angels — a group of Holocaust survivors determined to rebuild their lives and Yiddishkeit on more tolerant shores.

Mr. Sam Menlo, a central member of this group who passed away just over a year ago, had one of the most critical roles. He put up the first building of Yeshiva Torath Emeth (referred to as Toras Emes by the locals), using his own construction company and personal funds. Menlo was a colorful, larger-than-life character, a man with a sometimes-tough personality that masked a soft, compassionate heart. The story of his life provides a window into the drive to rebuild after the Holocaust, and the growth of Los Angeles’s yeshivah community.

It took not only brains or brawn, but great siyata d’Shmaya to survive the Holocaust, and Sam Menlo — nee Shimon Mendeleovitch — was one of them. Born in October of 1928, he was the oldest child of a prominent Vizhnitzer businessman in the town of Jod, Romania. He once said he spent his early years “plotting how to conquer the world,” despite being a small, thin child who would grow to just over five feet.

But Sam’s outsized ambitions were tempered by the chinuch he received at home and a large-hearted nature. “He learned about charity from an early age,” says his grandson Ushi Frankel. “His mother would prepare packages for needy families and ask him to deliver them, but she’d instruct him, ‘Don’t let them see you.’ The tzedakah was done with no fanfare, always preserving the dignity of the recipients.”

Sam was just a year or so past bar mitzvah age when the Nazis took away his father. He became his mother’s right hand, helping feed and care for his five siblings. It didn’t take the Germans long to come back to collect the rest of the family and the entire community. Sam, who had a very close relationship with his mother, walked with her out of the ghetto to the wagons waiting to transport them to Auschwitz. He was separated from her before they could say goodbye: “I cried all the way to Auschwitz,” he later said. He would be the only member of his family to survive.

In Auschwitz, he became inmate #55001, assigned to the gruesome work detail that loaded bodies into wheelbarrows after the gas chambers and carted them to the crematorium. He was later moved to Buchenwald, to an adjacent labor camp called Mittelbau-Dora, where he was put to work manufacturing planes and missiles.

Sam needed strong prescription glasses his whole life, and one day, while working in the factory, his glasses fell off. In an act of gratuitous cruelty, a German standing nearby smashed them with his boot. “In my family, we joke that maybe that’s why the Germans lost the war,” Ushi says. “My grandfather couldn’t see, so the missiles were probably built lopsided.”

As the course of the war reversed in the spring of 1945, the Russians approached Dora. The SS began transferring the inmates to Bergen-Belsen, some in box cars, others by death march. Then, as the Allies began advancing toward Bergen-Belsen (it was liberated by the British), the Germans began to retreat, and Sam and a friend grabbed the opportunity to escape. They had a lucky break: They found an abandoned truck, climbed in, and began driving toward the Swiss border.

Along the way, they encountered a women’s displaced person’s camp. The women gave them bread and butter. “It was like Heaven,” Sam later recalled. When the women clamored to come with him to Switzerland, he and his friend couldn’t refuse; they loaded as many women as they could into the truck. When they arrived at the border, however, they were refused entry because none of them had entry papers. Sam was nevertheless proud of himself: He was only about 15 years old, yet he managed to drive a truck full of refugees across Europe. “Bitachon got me through,” he later maintained. “I had no family, no one I could ask for advice.”

Since he rarely spoke about the war to his family, it’s unclear where Sam went right after that. His mother had expressed a hope that he’d become a doctor, and he made his way to Paris and enrolled himself in medical school — a brash move, since he’d missed out on formal schooling and didn’t grow up speaking French (he would eventually speak six or seven languages). He did quite well, but dropped out when he found it hard to handle the surgical theater.

Instead — perhaps inspired by his daredevil truck drive to Switzerland — he started a transport company. He developed enough of a reputation that his name came to the attention of Menachem Begin, who asked him to help bring a shipment of arms to Israel. Begin told him, “Do it, or I’ll ship you to Israel!”

“I could have gone to jail for ten years for smuggling arms,” Sam later recalled. “But I couldn’t allow Jews in Israel to be slaughtered for lack of ammunition.” The arms were delivered without incident.

He moved from trucking into import-export, but then he began hearing that there were better opportunities to make money in America. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski’s mother-in-law, with whom he had a connection from Europe, sponsored him to come to Milwaukee. There, he opened a furniture business, but it didn’t flourish the way he’d hoped. He then got involved in selling watches, traveling back and forth to Europe.

It was in Vienna, that a friend introduced him to Vera, a 21-year-old woman who’d moved there with her family from Hungary. Vera, along with her family — her parents and brother — had been hidden with non-Jews during the war.

Sam was 28 years old and immediately sensed that Vera was the right spouse for him. He married her in the space of two weeks, scouring Vienna to find just the right flowers for their wedding. Vera turned out to be the quintessential Hungarian eishes chayil, a woman who took care of her husband and family to perfection and possessed the same sense of noblesse oblige Sam had been raised with. “If he was about to give a donation to something, my grandmother would tell him, ‘Give double,’ ” grandson Ushi recounts. “He adored her, and they were a living example of how spouses should treat each other.” Sam had many pet names for Vera, but “Krone” — my crown — was the favorite.

Sam arranged for his new family to emigrate to the US; as he already had his immigration papers, he traveled ahead to apply for Vera and the others to join him. Vera arrived in New York in June of 1956, already expecting their first child, but found the humid, oppressive heat intolerable.

One of Sam’s friends from the alter heim, Yankel Kasirer a”h, had made his way to Los Angeles. The two had remained in contact, and Kasirer urged Sam to join him there, telling him L.A. had a small but growing community. (Yankel Kasirer would later become the backbone behind the fledgling Bais Yaakov of Los Angeles, and Sam, as his close friend, contributed generously to that cause.) Sam and Vera packed their bags and moved to LA.

Kasirer involved Sam in a joint venture with a small group of heimish Holocaust survivors who had banded together in L.A. “They bought a nursing home together,” says George Mann, currently the English principal at Toras Emes and a relative by marriage to the family. “They all worked there as employees — one was the cook, one was the janitor. It was the only way they could build it up.” Sam went from the retirement home business to establishing his own construction business and became a success both as a contractor and an investor in properties. “He was driven, and he was a risk taker,” Ushi says. Coming through adolescence in the crucible of the camps had forged his natural grit into steel.

And he was extremely disciplined. Ushi remembers that he’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. every day, swim laps, daven, eat breakfast, and arrive at work by 7:30 a.m. He ran a tight ship at his business; despite having missed out on formal schooling during the war, and in the absence of family or older friends to mentor him, he somehow grasped how to organize himself in an extremely efficient manner. “His notes were so organized and so succinct,” says Rabbi Avrohom Teichman, who served as menahel at Toras Emes. “They were a revelation to me.” Rabbi Teichman also remembers him as a shrewd judge of character. In his business, he employed hundreds of people yet dealt with almost all of them directly and took a personal interest in their lives and situations.

Desert Bloom

When the Menlos arrived in Los Angles in 1956, it was still considered a midbar where Jewish infrastructure was concerned. “When they arrived, my grandmother was one of three women in the community who wore a sheitel. The other two were rebbetzins,” says grandson Moishe Frankel. Having come from a chassidic family, Sam naturally gravitated toward a heimish-style shul called Mogen Abraham, and became close to its rav, Rabbi Judah Isacsohn.

Rav Isacsohn merits a story all to himself: A brother-in-law of the Satmar Rebbe, he was a talmid chacham and an intellectual. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1953, suffering from lung disease, in order to receive treatment at its City of Hope hospital; he stayed because the climate was salubrious for him. Despite serious health challenges, he became the spiritual leader of L.A.’s heimish community, leading Mogen Abraham and later Yeshiva Toras Emes.

Toras Emes had been founded by Sam’s chevreh of Holocaust survivors. It began in 1953 with one melamed and seven students in someone’s home. “Sam and his friends were determined to rebuild their families and a Torah community after the war,” says Rabbi Yaakov Krause, the dean of Toras Emes. Sam himself had been deprived of a Jewish education as a teen and as a young man, and it was extremely important to him that his children (four daughters and a son) receive one.

Rav Isacsohn was hired to run the yeshivah in 1957, a few years after its founding. As it grew, it moved out of a home into a series of rented spaces. But a fire in the mid-1970s destroyed the building they were using.

By then, the yeshivah had 100 students and clearly needed its own building. “Sam stepped up to the plate when no one else would,” says Rabbi Teichman. “He literally built it himself — he provided the money and used his own construction company, visiting the site every day to check on it.” The original building which bears his name, still stands at 540 North La Brea Avenue, although five other buildings have since joined the Toras Emes campus.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Sam predicted the school would one day have 250 students, although at the time, the school had barely 100, says Mr. Mann. “No one believed a heimish school in Los Angeles could have so many students. But today there are almost 1,000 talmidim, and baruch Hashem, Sam lived to see it.”

In fact, when construction started, someone proposed using steel construction rather than wood frame construction. The building was designed to have two floors, but steel construction would have made it possible to add a third. “At the time,” Rabbi Krause says, “we thought we’d be struggling to fill two floors; we figured, what’s the point of three? But we outgrew the two floors quickly, and Sam often lamented that he hadn’t used steel for the construction.

The building went up in 1976; in 1977, Rabbi Isacsohn passed away, and Rabbi Krause and Rabbi Teichman were asked to take over as principals of Toras Emes. Sam, who was the president of the board, approved their appointments.  “After Rabbi Isacsohn passed away, the building had just been erected, and there was a real concern whether the school would survive,” Rabbi Teichman says. “There was this new overhead, and we were growing by leaps and bounds. When I took over as principal in 1977, there were 180 students, and two years later we had 300. The budget was exploding.”

Rabbi Teichman would propose spending increases, and Sam’s job was to authorize them. Unsurprisingly, the two often ended up at loggerheads. “I once asked him for a $20,000 increase, and he said no,” Rabbi Teichman says. “I felt so strongly that we needed it, that I told him I’d raise the money myself. But for Sam, if something was working, if it was real, he’d take responsibility. He ended up covering that money himself.”

Those who knew Sam always make a point to mention that his wife Vera was his full partner in every step of community work. She liked to bring checks to the yeshivah herself, refusing to put them in the mail or have someone pick them up. “Why should I miss out on the mitzvah?” she’d say. Rabbi Berish Goldenberg, the yeshivah’s menahel, recalls that once a brochure was mistakenly mailed to Mrs. Menlo, soliciting money for a new girls’ building. Although the Menlos had already donated two buildings to the yeshivah, Mrs. Menlo immediately called Rabbi Goldenberg. “I apologized that she’d received it, since she and her husband had already done more than enough for the yeshivah,” he says. “But instead, she insisted on donating one classroom for the new building.”

Sam stood steadfastly by his principles even when it meant foregoing money. Rabbi Goldenberg remembers that a few years after the first yeshivah building was constructed, a company offered to pay the yeshivah $5,000 a month — a substantial sum in the late 1970s — if the school would allow them to mount a billboard on the roof. “The school was in a good corner location, and the company was willing to work with us — no ads for smoking, no ads for movies,” Rabbi Goldenberg says. “I think we settled on a ‘Got Milk’ billboard. The yeshivah was struggling then — this was over 30 years ago — and we were sure Mr. Menlo would be pleased by the extra income.”

To their surprise, he wasn’t. “No one is hanging billboards over my yeshivah!” he thundered. For Sam, a yeshivah was a makom kadosh. It should never be cheapened by advertising, even if the yeshivah was flailing financially.

Later, Sam would also provide much of the funding for Valley Torah, recognizing the need for a yeshivah that offered a well-rounded education. “He knew that without Jewish education, there is no Jewish continuity,” Rabbi Avrohom Stuhlberger, the yeshivah’s director, has said. He also contributed to kollelim and a cheder.

“Sam had a reputation as a tough taskmaster, but I found him more consistent than tough,” says Rabbi Teichman. “He was single-minded. If you came on board to do a job or a mission, he could hang you out to dry until he was convinced you were doing your best.”

“He expected his children and grandchildren to work hard, to try their best,” Moishe Frankel says, “and he followed everyone’s progress through school.” Sam’s investment in yeshivos paid off in his personal life, as he saw his children and grandchildren grow up to raise solid, Torah-true families.

In his personal life, he continued to deepen his own connection to Torah. “He began wearing a beketshe in his later years, to feel connected to his Vizhnitzer father,” Ushi says, “and he developed connections to many chassidic rebbes.” When Vizhnitz decided to establish a community in Monsey, Sam took responsibility for raising the money to get the community on its feet. He became particularly close to the Munkacser Rebbe in New York, after one of his daughters became engaged to a young man from that chassidus. Having witnessed the world of his youth go up in smoke, he derived great nachas seeing his family come full circle, with grandchildren enlivening his home, some even in peyos. “It was very important for him to name for his family members who perished in the Holocaust,” Ushi says. “Many of those names by now have been given more than once.” In his heart, he always retained a drive to make his beloved parents proud of him in Shamayim and carried out many projects in their memory.

Sam was tough on the outside, but soft when it came to his family and the needy. He never forgot his own struggles to build himself up from nothing and helped thousands of people from his community, often with loans with easy terms (many of which were never repaid). Moishe Frankel even remembers that he extended a loan to open the first heimish pizza store in the neighborhood. Many community members who became successful owe a debt of gratitude to Sam for being so generous in dispensing advice and direction as they were starting out.

But chinuch was always his pet project. “The school was his baby,” Mr. Mann says. “After Sam retired as president, I took over as president, and used to visit him sometimes to collect money for the yeshivah. Other friends of his would contribute, but he used to farher me about it. He wanted to know every fact and figure.”

Rabbi Goldenberg recalls the time Sam’s son-in-law Yaakov Winter, who’d become involved in the school, decided to undertake some remodeling. The “remodeling” ended up being the construction of an extension that required the yeshivah to move out for four months and cost $1 million. Who paid? Sam Menlo, of course. He later told Rabbi Goldenberg, “Yaakov said he wanted to remodel, so I thought he meant doing some painting and new floors. But it’s okay, he’s a good boy.”

Sam was never a publicity seeker and remained simple in his tastes and manner of dress. “My mother had no idea, growing up, that her parents had money,” Moishe Frankel says. “They lived for years in a house with only one bathroom for the children.”

“They were even an example of how to treat one’s parents,” Ushi says. “Since my grandfather Sam had lost his parents during the war, his wife’s parents became his parents. During the last 10 or 15 years of my great-grandmother’s life, she lived with my grandparents, and they were devoted to her. My grandfather even used to help feed her when it became necessary.” Although he built up a fortune, Sam’s life wasn’t protected from tragedy. He lost one, then two adult daughters to illness, but he and Vera soldiered through with dignity and emunah. (“I never ask why,” Vera said.) In later life, he suffered a series of strokes that left him infirm. For the last 18 years of his life, he spent most of his time at home where a group of balabatim would unite regularly for shiurim, allowing Sam the opportunity to enjoy the learning he’d been deprived of in childhood and had to ration during his working years. “I would go to visit, and it seemed to me he spent his whole day davening, in tallis and tefillin,” Moishe says.

It’s now just over a year since Sam Menlo was niftar, and his grandchildren can barely imagine what life was like when Los Angeles had no yeshivos, no kollelim, no kosher restaurants. Sam Menlo and his tough, determined survivor friends put in the sweat equity necessary to rebuild Yiddishkeit after the war. They transformed their community from a midbar into the Torah center of the West Coast, turning Jewish Los Angeles into a true city of angels. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 752)