Convention, and Conviction,Chaya Landau is 28 years old. She is also CEO of a real estate development company in Zurich, overseeing large-scale building projects from start to finish and negotiating million-franc deals regularly. A petite mother of five from a community where women rarely go out to work, her situation is intriguing. How did she come to obtain this unusual, demanding position, and how does she feel about it? Chaya shares her eye-opening and inspiring story.
Chaya* was always atypical. The fifth of eleven siblings born to a well-known chassidish family in Zurich* she stood out from a young age. Already at five years old she’d wow her father — a prominent maggid shiur — with scintillating questions on the parshah and he’d jokingly marvel at his wunderkind: “Di hust a kup fun a yingele!” (you have the intellect of a boy!).
But as she grew older there was less marveling and more clashing of wills. Chaya was quick-witted bright and — ultra-opinionated. A deep thinker with a mind of her own she was eventually deemed a nonconformist teenager who didn’t quite fit the family mold and her school years were rocky.
Once she finished her compulsory seminary stint Chaya — now only seventeen years old — took on four teaching jobs in Zurich working from seven-thirty to four each day. She taught both boys and girls Hebrew and secular subjects in several different schools and would come home thoroughly exhausted.
When the shidduch stage began it became clear that Chaya had unusual ideas of who she wanted to marry.
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