A Satmar tycoon worth $500 million says: Stop taking Zionist money
Why Yoely Landau’s fiery letter to the Rebbe of Gur struck a nerve from New York to Jerusalem.
Yoely Landau is an eccentric 45-year-old ultra-Orthodox businessman who made his fortune in the nursing home industry in New York. His name hit the local headlines about a decade ago when he purchased a public building called Rivington House from the New York City government for $28 million, and within 13 months managed to change its zoning and resell it for a profit of about $70 million. The affair was dubbed the “Rivington Scandal.” The deputy mayor of New York resigned, the city changed its procedures, but Landau and his business partners emerged almost unscathed. Since then, he has built a reputation in New York as a controversial, sophisticated, and perhaps even dubious figure.
Alongside his booming business empire - his wealth is estimated at half a billion dollars - Landau has also become a prominent figure within the Haredi world, even though he is a Satmar Hasid and apparently named after the legendary Rebbe who died in 1979. Landau maintains extensive ties across the entire Haredi, Hasidic, and Lithuanian communities. He frequently travels by private plane and helicopter, and is far from ascetic or modest. (As one minor example: at his daughter’s Sheva Brachot - the week-long celebration following a wedding - he flew in mentalist Lior Suchard and singer Ishay Ribo from Israel.) He loves the spotlight, cultivates connections with influential figures of all kinds, and is beloved within his community for his generous donations.
Last week, Landau brought together his two personas: the shrewd businessman and the beloved Haredi benefactor. The elderly (86-year-old) Rebbe of Gur, Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, spiritual leader of Agudath Israel, arrived in the United States to raise funds to compensate for cuts to the yeshiva budget. He stayed with Landau and traveled on his private jet. Landau himself also made a sizable donation, but at the same time, he decided to tell the Rebbe exactly what he thinks of the way Israel’s Haredi parties and leaders are running things. True to form, he did so in a personal letter, later widely circulated, which mixed lavish praise with sharp criticism and insinuations that “Satmar is better.”
Despite his antics, the letter is worth examining. While Landau is not a spiritual leader, his position as an anti-Zionist Satmar follower and major donor offers a glimpse into internal Haredi criticism, and creates an unusual and revealing encounter between the anti-Zionist Haredi worldview and the Zionist-Israeli reality.
Money as a Fundraising Engine
Landau argues that Haredi reliance on the state harms the community economically, psychologically, and spiritually. He claims that depending on state funding lowers incentives for community rabbis to nurture a generation of wealthy supporters who can sustain the educational institutions. This reliance soon becomes real dependency: Haredi society starts to see itself as incapable of meeting its own financial needs and fails to educate its children to take responsibility for funding the institutions themselves, hence the lack of major donations from wealthy Haredim in Israel. Finally, economic dependence on the state, Landau warns, leads to spiritual compromises - most critically, the willingness to conscript young men who do not study Torah and Talmud (whom Landau and many Haredim regard as “secular and destructive”) in exchange for government funding for yeshivas.
In strong religious language, Landau’s letter distinguishes between the Rebbe of Gur and other Haredi leaders. In his view, the Rebbe of Gur is “the only one who stood up with strength and courage to leave the government that threatens to conscript the young men of Israel into their impure army,” and who dared to declare that “there will be no compromises in Gur; we will not abandon even a young man who is not studying.” By contrast, he accuses other rabbis of making “compromises to defile the young men of Israel and send their sons to be sacrificed by the Zionists.”
Landau may be more extreme than some ultra-Orthodox rabbis in his views on the Israeli army, but his claim that “their entire ambition is to find a law of ‘the lesser evil,’ all to get money from the state again, and for that money they convince themselves that it is not a grave sin to send young men into the army” is not entirely off the mark. From the perspective of many Haredim in New York, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox dependence on government money is deeply embarrassing.
Landau warns that the Israeli government is increasingly aware of its leverage over the Haredi sector and will use it to reshape it: “Today, the heads of state have begun to see their mistake. They demand something in return for the money—they want oversight of educational institutions. At first it was budget cuts, but now they brazenly demand a say in the curriculum itself.” He is referring to demands for core studies - English, math, and so on - and his broader point holds true: Israeli taxpayers, who fund the Haredi sector, have begun to demand accountability. They do not expect a financial “return,” but they do want to know that their money will not ultimately harm the state’s social or economic fabric.
The Satmar Hasid from New York urges the Rebbe of Gur, who recently pulled out of the coalition, to complete the break: “Go from being dependent on the state to being your own masters, beholden to no one.” In essence, Landau shows the Rebbe how the Israeli Haredim are seen from the outside: “We have become needy and spoiled by the infidels, instead of the yeshiva students and householders being the patrons of the institutions.”
He cites the radical Satmar approach as a model: “The late Rebbe (Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum) taught the public to work hard and shoulder the burden themselves. In doing so, he set the wheel of success in motion.” In other words, dependence on the state and lack of work ethic are not only a burden on Israeli taxpayers, they create a weaker society, one unable to take responsibility for itself and lacking the motivation to progress.
Associates of the Rebbe of Gur told Calcalist that the longstanding disagreements between Satmar and Gur over accepting state funds will not disappear anytime soon, each has its own approach. No one really expected otherwise. In the end, Landau is still just a rich young man, and many saw his letter as audacious, even insolent, toward the Rebbe of Gur. But it went viral within the Haredi world, not for gossip’s sake, but because it hit a nerve that many Haredim in Israel have felt for years: Isn’t our dependence on the state degrading? Isn’t it harming us spiritually, socially, and economically? In truth, it’s not only Haredim asking these questions, many secular Israelis say the same: “We don’t need you to be Zionists, we’ll manage. But please, take responsibility for yourselves. Don’t put it on us. It’s already too expensive.”
