M

y father, Melvin S. Landow z”l, grew up impoverished, in a tenement in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood.

From the age of nine, he worked to help support his family, offering his services first as a shoeshine boy, then delivering newspapers, then as a “barker” at the famed Coney Island amusement park. (His trademark “bark” was, “Give me a nickel, I’ll guess your weight.”)

The local non-Jewish kids would regularly chase him and steal his hard-earned money, and over the years he became so good at running away from them that he was accepted to college on a track scholarship. But before he could start college, he was drafted into the US Army, at the age of 18, while World War II was raging.

He was stationed in the Philippines, and before Rosh Hashanah he was invited, along with all the Jewish servicemen in the area, to attend High Holiday services on a nearby island.

As the rabbi of the makeshift synagogue brought out a sefer Torah to read, torrential rains started to fall. My father had grown up with only superficial Jewish observance, but he immediately pulled off his poncho and used it to cover the Torah scroll, standing there soaking wet while the Torah remained covered and protected.

Upon returning to the US after the war, he married my mother and took a job working for a door-to-door salesman who sold television sets. As the salesman’s assistant, he would schlep the TV sets up the stairs of the local apartment buildings. One day, he asked for a chance to sell a TV himself.

The first door he knocked on was opened by a woman who said, “Sorry, I don’t buy from door-to-door salesmen.”

“Well,” he replied, “you’re in luck! I’m not a door-to-door salesman — I’m just a schlepper. You’re the first person I’ve ever tried to sell a TV to.”

Charmed by his sales pitch, she bought the TV from him.

So successful was he at selling TVs that he managed to open his own appliance store, which grew into a chain known as Kelly & Cohen Appliances. Ten years after he opened his first store, he sold his share of the business and moved to Miami Beach, Florida. By then, he had earned enough money that he no longer needed to work. But when he overheard my brother telling his friend that his father was “unemployed,” he decided to go back into the appliance business, opening a chain of stores called Kennedy & Cohen that yielded his second fortune. At that point, he bought a mansion on a large tract of land that also contained a tennis court and a pool.

In 1972, my father met Rabbi Sholom Ber Lipskar, a Chabad rabbi who urged him to put on tefillin and attend Torah classes. My father was not interested at first, but Rabbi Lipskar would not be deterred, and he would come to our house again and again to talk to my father about Yiddishkeit. At one point, Rabbi Lipskar brought my father to a meeting to discuss the local Chabad day school, whose doors were about to close due to lack of funds. The school did not have a permanent location — it was housed above a fish store at that point — and it couldn’t pay its rent or its teachers. Since this was not a problem that could be solved with a small donation, my father, like the rest of the people at the meeting, did not see himself as part of the solution.

But that night he had a dream.

In his dream, children were playing a game of hide-and-seek with a sefer Torah. Each time the sefer Torah was hidden, the children were able to find it because of the bright light that emanated from it. Then, one older boy hid the sefer Torah in the attic, which concealed its light. The children looked for the scroll, but when they could not find it, they became frustrated and decided to play a different game, abandoning their search for the sefer Torah.

My father, the man who had volunteered to be drenched in the rain rather than allow a sefer Torah to become wet, awoke from that dream with tears rolling onto his pillow. In the morning, he called Rabbi Lipskar and told him, “I will build you a new yeshivah, even if it means I have to sell my house to pay for it.”

With that, the Landow Yeshiva was born. Not only did my father commit to paying for the building — which cost half a million dollars, an astronomical sum at the time — he also pledged to cover all of the yeshivah’s operating expenses, including the tuition of any child whose parents could not afford to pay. For years after his initial donation, he and my mother contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the yeshivah that bore — and still bears — their name.

In the meantime, his own children — my two brothers and I, his only daughter — attended public schools and were exposed to little Jewish observance, although he himself did begin to lay tefillin, at the behest of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

My father’s rich colleagues ridiculed him for what they viewed as his misguided largesse, and even the rabbi of the local Reform temple where I went to Hebrew school called him to express his dismay.

“Why don’t you donate to my temple?” he demanded. “Why are you donating so much money to a yeshivah that your own children don’t even attend?”

“It took me over 30 years to answer that question,” my father later told me.

My father suffered even more humiliation when his business went bankrupt in the mid-1970s and he lost all of his money. His only remaining asset was his mansion, which he could not afford to maintain. He sold the property, moving with my mother into a two-bedroom condominium.

“You should have bought a yacht instead of a yeshivah,” his wealthy cronies reproached him. “Had you done that, you would at least have something left now to cash in.”

By the time I married and began raising a family, my father was no longer a wealthy man. After my husband, Dr. Michael Albert, became a dentist, we settled in Boca Raton, about an hour’s drive from Miami Beach.

Early in our marriage, I experienced a short bout of depression. I went to see psychiatrists and psychologists, but none of them could help me. One night, out of desperation, I decided to pick up a Hebrew-English Chumash that my father had given me as a gift when I was young girl. When I started to read the words “In the beginning G-d created heaven and earth,” I suddenly began to feel G-d’s presence and overwhelming love in a palpable way. It was an intensely spiritual experience that defies description.

I understood then that G-d had lifted me up from my depression — and that I would never again merit such a revelation of G-d’s presence unless I earned it. Right then and there, I decided that I would do whatever it takes to earn that closeness to G-d, which meant that I had to learn more about Him.

Early the next morning, when I called my father to tell him what had happened, he said, “You don’t have to tell me what happened to you, because when I laid tefillin yesterday I prayed that G-d should show Himself to you, and I know that that’s what happened.”

At the time, Michael and I belonged to a Reform temple, and our children attended a Reform preschool. Having no rabbi to consult and no local Torah classes to attend, I visited a Jewish bookstore in Miami Beach once a month and bought hundreds of Jewish books in English, ranging from Ramchal’s Derech Hashem to the Code of Jewish Law to Ruchama Shain’s All for the Boss. By reading these books, I taught myself how to come closer to G-d — which, I soon realized, meant that I, and my family, had to become religious.

For my 30th birthday, in 1985, my husband bought me a brand-new BMW. I asked him to return the car and, in exchange, give me the gift of a kosher kitchen.

My path to observance was hardly smooth. Although I wanted to become religious, doing so involved turning over my entire universe, and a voice inside me would sometimes challenge me: Are you crazy? Why are you doing this? In my journey to becoming frum, I was my own worst enemy, doubting myself at various points along the way and vacillating about decisions I made to take on greater observance. (I should add that even today, over 30 years after I became frum, I still struggle with myself to become a better Jew. The process of teshuvah is a lifelong journey, not a onetime turnaround.)

I think the hardest internal battle I waged was over the decision to move from our irreligious neighborhood to a different part of Boca Raton, where a small Orthodox community was starting to coalesce. Eventually, we bought a property in that area, which enabled us to walk to shul on Shabbos and send our children to religious schools, at which point our Yiddishkeit took a giant leap forward. We built a large, beautiful home on the property we bought, and after we moved in, we hosted elaborate Shabbos meals each week with many guests, including my parents, who reveled in the nachas.

Several months after we moved into our home, Michael left the group dental practice he belonged to and established his own private practice. At around that time, I gave birth to my third child and had to give up my job as a preschool director at the local Jewish community center. For about a year, our income took a big hit, and we could no longer afford the tuition of our two older children.

The rabbi of the community was very kind, and he offered to raise the money to cover our tuitions. But Michael declined. “Karen,” he told me, “we have no business living in a house this size and taking charity to cover our children’s tuition. We’re going to sell the house and pay the tuition.”

“What?” I cried. “We just spent 18 months building this house!”

But when I thought about it later, I realized that while I considered myself the driving force behind our family’s spiritual journey, Michael was the one who had truly internalized the values of Yiddishkeit. It was then that I recognized that my husband was my true bashert.

Many years earlier, my father had stated that he would be willing to sell his house to build the yeshivah. At the time, he had not needed to sell his house, but perhaps, I reflected, his willingness to do so is what gave me the strength to go along with my husband’s idea to sell our own house to pay for our children’s Torah education.

With the money from the sale, we paid our tuition fees and bought a smaller house.

Hashem paid us back many times over for that decision. One day, a wealthy woman from the neighborhood knocked on my door and said, “Hi, I’m here to buy your house.”

“Sorry, my house isn’t for sale,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” she responded. “I’m buying this house. Name your price.”

It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. From the handsome profits of that sale we paid off our mortgage and swapped our house for another house two doors down. Eventually, we sold our house in Boca Raton, and with that money we were able to buy a small townhouse in Beit Shemesh and support our married children in learning.

Ten years ago, my husband and I made aliyah, joining three of our children who have settled in Eretz Yisrael. Two of our children live in Florida, and although our family is not Lubavitch, some of my grandchildren actually attended the Landow Yeshiva preschool.

When my grandchildren enrolled in the Landow Yeshiva, my father, their proud great-grandfather, finally had an answer for the people who had ridiculed him for donating millions to the yeshivah. “My children didn’t attend the Landow Yeshiva,” he said, “and my grandchildren didn’t attend the Landow Yeshiva. But my great-grandchildren do attend the Landow Yeshiva.”

Later in life, he described the opportunity to build the yeshivah as “winning the lottery.” When we’d pass by the yeshivah building together, he would point to it and say, “This, no one can ever take away from me.” By that time, his business was a distant memory, his investments and real estate were gone, and he had no significant assets to his name. All that was left of his wealth was the yeshivah — through which, the Lubavitcher Rebbe once told him, he had brought 100,000 Jewish youth back to their Source.

In 2008, my father died suddenly, at the age of 81, after collapsing of a heart attack during a game of tennis. By the time I heard the news and rushed to his side, he had already passed on to the Next World, but I merited to sit with his body and guard it before the burial. Knowing that his neshamah could still hear what was going on, I sang to him, “A hundred thousand Jews are singing songs of Shabbos,” thinking that this would comfort him as he made his transition to the Next World — and that it would be his ticket to the World to Come.

Mel Landow never had the opportunity to attend a yeshivah, nor did he send any of his children to yeshivah. But today, his great-grandchildren attend yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael and America, while his spiritual descendants — the students of the Landow Yeshiva, past and present — continue to sing songs of Shabbos all over the world.

Up in Gan Eden, he’s still cashing in on his winning lottery ticket.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 754)