Robert Shemin believes anyone can corner the market, and participants of his course are sold

Photos: Avi Gass

When my sons were mesivta age and my non-Orthodox parents would come visit, they always seemed baffled by the amount of time the boys spent on limudei kodesh. Realizing limudei chol only took place a few hours a day, my father a”h would start to look worried.

“How are they going to be able to support a family one day?” he’d ask.

How indeed? Even in frum circles, where prioritizing Torah learning is a given, the question lingers. Many people are unable or unwilling to earn a professional degree. Where does that leave the people who lack formal schooling but need to put bread on the table for their families?

Robert Shemin, real estate investor and educator extraordinaire, has a solution. It’s called Project X, and it’s both a crash course in real estate and a lifelong connection to professional guidance and networking.

Robert’s a Jewish boy from Nashville, although his parents weren’t religious and didn’t send him to yeshivah. They sent him to public school, but even there he struggled — he had dyslexia.

“I can read but I can’t type,” he says in Successful Real Estate Investing (John Wiley, 2004). “I also have no sense of direction; I can’t read a map, I can’t put a three-year-old’s toy together. I have no spatial abilities.”

He graduated high school at the bottom of his class. Today, however, he’s worth megabucks.

In his thirties, after making a fortune in real estate, he decided to pay it forward by educating others how to succeed as he did. He began writing books and offering seminars to share the tricks of the trade, and giving lectures in countries all over the world.

One of those countries on his lecture circuit is Israel. Shemin began offering his course to groups of chareidim in Jerusalem some years ago. One father and son team, Zevi and Simcha Bennet, enjoyed such success that they approached Mishpacha to help spread the word to other segments of the frum community and create a Project X course tailored for them. This past March, Shemin and his colleagues came to the Ramada Inn in Toms River to present a full-day introduction to his method and Project X, along with the Bennets and Mishpacha publisher Eli Paley and staff.