by ruthie blum
the jerusalem post
Running into Twin Towers chief engineer Hy (Chaim) Brown on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary is about as chillingly coincidental as the venue of the chance encounter is comical. It turns out we share the same hairdresser, although Brown, here for a trim prior to a trip abroad, prefers to call him a barber.
It is Brown, however, who is engaging in all the barbs. Rattling off amusing anecdotes about his aliyah and other exploits with the ease and wit of a Jackie Mason, he seems more like an entertainer than a retired construction giant with grandiose plans for developing the Negev.
It sounds so familiar as to be tiresome. Except for one thing: Brown’s blueprints are actually in the final stages — not only conceptually, but contractually.
In a two-hour interview, Brown, who also designed and built Florida’s Disney World, hotels, casinos and medical centers, discussed his REAL Housing (Renewed Energy for Affordable Living) business concept, which aspires to bring inexpensive and fully equipped solar homes to the Holy Land.
The idea to bring it to Israel in bulk came after the disengagement from Gaza and Brown’s anticipation of further withdrawals from the West Bank.
“Seeing the way that no preparations were made for the evacuees of Gush Katif, and the way things have been going since then with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the U.S. government, it became obvious to me that at some point in my lifetime they’re going to give away part of Judea and Samaria,” he said.
“If so, there are going to be 100,000 people we’d better figure out where to put.”
Brown moved to Israel in 2003.
Whatever else Brown, 65, feels about the tragedy, the Brooklyn boy who made it big says he harbors no guilt.
“It’s not the responsibility of the designers and builders,” he says of the collapse of the WTC following the airborne suicide bombings. “It’s the government’s responsibility to prevent terrorist attacks.” Brown elaborates on that, and other matters, here.
Q: Where were you on 9/11?
A: I was lying in bed in Boulder, Colo. My daughter phoned to tell me that the first building was hit. I was scheduled to play golf before going to a dentist’s appointment. And I did. From the golf course, I went to the dentist. When I exited the dentist’s office, dozens of reporters and TV crews were waiting for me. That was when I discovered I was the only one left alive to interview.
In 1993, after the first attempt to blow up the WTC, there were a lot of us. I figured they’d get to me sooner or later, after interviewing the people in New York. But this time, they had no choice, which is why they were all waiting for me to respond.
Q: With Novocain in your gums?
A: Yup, with Novocain and trying not to bite my lip while I spoke. When I was done, I called my wife and told her that I was going back to finish my round of golf, and she said, “Oh no you’re not. Everybody’s here at the house — all over the lawn.”
So I went home and faced the music for several more hours.
Q: Where does Israel fit into this
picture?
A: About a week after the event, it dawned on me that these are the same terrorists who have been attacking Israel since 1947, and I felt I had to do something about it. I don’t know exactly what I had in mind, but I wanted to make some kind of statement.
That statement was offered to me when Yigal Cohen-Orgad, the chairman of the executive committee of the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, asked me if I would consider accepting a teaching position.
In 2002, my students at the University of Colorado entered a competition held by the U.S. Much to our surprise — we won.
The same competition was held three years later. Again we decided to enter, but this time, we decided to try to make the house affordable, since the first house cost half a million dollars just to build. Again we won — this time with a 70-meter house that only cost $50,000.
This gave me the idea to adapt the house for Israel. Which means, in addition to the dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, stove and oven, I put in a Shabbat heating plata and a kum-kum. I also put in two kitchen sinks and had a rabbi tell me how far apart they have to be.
Then I thought that if my idea is to have these houses for families moving to the Negev, why not erect whole communities? That is how REAL Housing was born. It will be an Israeli company — with a rabbi on board, so I don’t makes mistakes with the sinks and the mikve and the eruv.
Q: When is this getting off the ground?
A: Final papers will be signed when I return from the United States in October. I just signed a deal to bring these houses to Africa. And we have orders all over the place.
I just made a deal with a kibbutz in the Galilee, which has a plant we can use for a year or so, which means I can now start having the parts delivered there. At the moment, we are desperately trying to make a model house to show here, because the only existing model right now is in the United States.
Q: Does it cost a lot of money to have the houses assembled?
A: This is where Project Base Planning comes in. I’m going to train the students [from the College of Judea and Samaria in] or Ben-Gurion in assembling the houses as part of their service to the community.
Q: How do the houses run on solar energy?
A: Four days of sun a month, and you can operate all electrical appliances limitlessly.
Q: How did you come to make aliyah?
A: I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, N.Y. I married an observant Jew. We kept kosher and Shabbat and all that. Then my wife died of cancer at the age of 43, leaving me with three children. I was working all over the place. It’s hard to mourn in places like that, where everybody wants to party all the time. So, I decided to take a job in Tucson, building the Tucson Medical Center — where I didn’t know anybody and nobody knew me.
It was there that I met Nancy — a Quaker — and fell in love with her. After getting married, we moved to Los Angeles. In 1993, there was a big earthquake, which destroyed our house. I was prepared to fix it, but it turned out that Nancy not only hated the house, but hated L.A. and our whole lifestyle.
So, we decided to start from scratch in Boulder. Before we’d even had a chance to unpack, she received a phone call from Pepperdine, asking her to teach a Holocaust course in a summer study-abroad program, which included spending two weeks in Israel. She accepted. In preparation, she read, for the first time in her life, several books on the Holocaust and became horrified that, as she put it, “the Christians of the world did nothing about the atrocity.”
She took the kids to various camps in Germany and then Israel. When she arrived in Israel, she got off the plane and started to cry. She told me she felt she had come home.
One day, after 14 years of marriage, she came to me and said she wanted to convert to Judaism. As part of her conversion process, she was told she had to live in Israel, among the Orthodox, for a year. She went to Israel, and I joined her six months later.
When I got off the plane, I took one look at her and knew she didn’t want to move back to America.
Q: What did you see in her that made you realize this?
A: She had a glow. And I thought that if this is what makes her happy, so be it — even though it means I’ve got to wear a yarmulke again and go to shul. I initially thought I was coming here to retire — you know, play golf in Caesarea and stuff like that. But my wife is convinced that coming here to develop the Negev is actually my purpose in life.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California