Six years ago, Chicago nursing home baron and philanthropist Rabbi Morris Esformes was visiting a retirement facility he owns outside of Daytona Beach, Fla.

The area is celebrated for being the home of the Daytona 500, but Esformes didn't think there was even a 500-person Jewish community there. So he was surprised when he noticed an occupational therapist at the retirement village wearing the garb of an Orthodox Jewish woman.

An Orthodox Jew himself, Esformes started a conversation with the woman, who told him there was an Orthodox community in the small nearby town of Ormand Beach, with a kosher restaurant, a mikvah and a "very small shack" for a shul or synagogue.

"Where do the children go to school?" Esformes asked.

"We don't have a (Jewish) school. They go to public school," was the answer.

"I was so intrigued that that same afternoon I got in my car and drove to Ormand Beach," Esformes relates six years later during an interview in his Lincolnwood business office. He found the Chabad center, which doubled as a synagogue and was indeed "this little shack, like a shanty house," he says. "I walked in and the rabbi happened to be there."

That rabbi was Pinchas Ezagui, who with his wife Chani had been in Ormand Beach for 15 years and had had a great impact on the area's diverse Jewish community of about 1,800 families.

"We started talking and I said, rabbi, I don't understand," Esformes says. "You've made all these people Sabbath-observant and yet they're sending their kids to public school."

Rabbi Ezagui told Esformes that he dreamed of building a new synagogue and Jewish day school, but there was no one in the young community with the necessary funds to make the dream a reality. "He said, maybe some day if I'm lucky before I die, I'll have something like that in Ormand Beach," Esformes relates the rabbi's poignant words.

Esformes told him, "Chanukah came early this year. This is intolerable. You can't send your children to public school. I'll build you a school and a shul."

He wasn't sure the rabbi believed him - "I was in my jeans and sweatshirt with my tzitzit hanging out," he says - but eventually, the reality sunk in.

"He called me back and said, oh my god, you are really serious. I said rabbi, I wouldn't say it if I wasn't," Esformes says.

And that's how it happened that just a few weeks ago, more than 500 people, including a large Chicago contingent, joined Esformes and Rabbi Ezagui for the dedication of the Esformes Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center of Greater Daytona Beach, a complex that includes a 25,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style synagogue, a school with 10 high-tech classrooms, a ballroom, commercial kitchen, library and separate mikvahs for men and women. Esformes donated $4 million of the $5.5 million needed to build the complex and helped to raise the rest.

Now he's planning to do the same thing in Alaska.

Funding Jewish institutions is nothing new for Esformes. He's been involved in establishing Jewish community centers, preschools, day schools, Sunday schools and other Jewish establishments across the United States and in Israel. In Chicago, he has been the largest donor to the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago's Jewish Day School Guaranty Trust Fund initiative, which benefits 15 federation-supported day schools.

Naturally, his own three now-grown children, Philip, Rivka and Rachel, received a Jewish day school education.

Jewish institutions aren't the only ones that have benefited from Esformes' philanthropy. After he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer several years ago and was successfully treated at the University of Chicago Medical Center, he gave $2.5 million to support a professorship in several health care fields, including radiation and oncology. (He says his health is fine now.) And last year, he made a major gift to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center, which he says saved his father's life more than 20 years ago.

Esformes is a native of Los Angeles, but came to Chicago to attend the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie and never left. He served for a time as assistant principal at the Arie Crown Hebrew Day School (whose campus bears the family name), then went into the nursing home business in 1969. Now 62, he is the owner or part-owner of more than 20 nursing homes and other facilities in Illinois and Florida.

His passion, though, is Jewish education, and now he's turning his thoughts - and his funds - more and more to communities outside of the major Jewish population centers.

"Over the past 35 years in Jewish education, it's been the standard thing; I've helped schools in Chicago, New York, Israel, and I made the most substantial gift to the (Chicago) Jewish Day School Guaranty Trust Fund," he says during the interview in his office, in the midst of constantly ringing phones and bustling assistants and where Esformes, looking lean and fit, appears wearing shorts, a T-shirt and baseball cap.

"All these things are very nice, but Chicago has 275,000 Jews," he says. "This (the Daytona Beach project) was totally different. All these other projects were to help continue the chain of Torah Judaism in our community. This saved the lives of an entire community, so this has a meaning to me more than probably to anybody else, because I never was involved in something where I literally saved people's lives."

Comparing the Daytona Beach project to the Jewish Day School Guaranty Trust Fund, he says the Trust Fund's mission is "to make sure that for the next 125 years, Jewish education will be maintained and that we will always be able to educate our Jewish children. The problem is that's very nice for the big cities, but what do you do about the small communities who are starving for something?"

The larger concern, he says, is for no less than the future of the Jewish people. "Outside of the Orthodox world, 80 percent of all Jewish children are not receiving any formalized Jewish education," he says. "Plus the fact that if the rate of intermarriage stays the way it is, if we don't establish educational centers where kids can learn about who they are" the consequences will be dire for the Jewish people.

"The bottom line is that Hitler in his wildest dreams could never have done unto the Jews what the Jews are doing to themselves. When I hear that I cringe, so I've pretty much devoted my life to helping Jewish education in areas where we seem to be remiss."

One of those areas was Daytona Beach, where "the only thing they know is booze, tattoos, spring break and the (Daytona) 500, not necessarily in that order," Esformes says, laughing. But since the Ezaguis arrived, he adds, there are 65 Shabbat-observant families in the area, and many more Jews scattered throughout the region who avail themselves of some of the services of the community. But, Esformes notes, no Jewish day school existed between West Palm Beach and Atlanta - a huge, Jewishly untapped region.

That all changed on May 17, when more than 125 Chicagoans were among some 500 people who turned out for the dedication of the synagogue, school and community center. Among them was Steven Nasatir, president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, who spoke at the dedication.

"I like Rabbi Esformes and the last number of years I've really worked with him closely," Nasatir said in a phone conversation. "He's a huge part of the reason the Day School Guaranty Trust has been such a success - not just the giving, but the work he puts into it."

The dedication was "a really wonderful simcha," Nasatir says. "Esformes says we can't afford to lose even one Jewish child, and it's a call that resonates for every Jew regardless of denomination if you think about continuity. Day school is an excellent vehicle for that, and I think it's also a symbol of the basic fundamentals of what a Jewish community must have to be a Jewish community. One of the things it must have is Jewish education. This is 'build it and they will come' as opposed to 'they came and we need to build it.'"

That assessment is borne out by Rabbi Ezagui, who says that Jews from across the region have begun flocking to Ormand Beach since the dedication and that enrollment in the day school, which will open in September, has already reached 40 students and will surely go up before school starts.

"To have an enrollment of 40 kids in this area is a big number," he said in a phone conversation. "It's the equivalent of 400 kids in Miami. There are about 1,500 Jewish families in the whole radius and 50 or 60 percent of them are assimilated. Everybody goes to public school here. Nobody sends their kids to private school," making the enrollment numbers even more surprising.

Ezagui turns passionate when he talks about Esformes and what he has done for Judaism in the region. "This is like when you're driving through the desert for hundreds of miles and then you come on Las Vegas in the middle of the desert," he says. "On a Jewish level, what Morris has created here is literally an oasis of spirituality, Judaism in the middle of a (spiritual) desert. Who would expect a place like this to have something of the magnitude of this Jewish center, which encompasses everything? -- synagogue, preschool, elementary school, commercial kitchen, library, mikvah."

Esformes, he says, is "a visionary. He saw potential here, he saw the growth of a Jewish community and he took the bull by the horns. (The synagogue) is so beautiful, gorgeous, a knockout. Morris gets the credit for having a vision and being a true leader."

In addition, Ezagui says, what happened in his community "helps other small communities to have hope, to see that things like this can happen. Sometimes rabbis and lay leaders in small communities feel there is no hope, that it's a battle with no end. This is an eye-opener for all small communities across America."

He notes that, since day school is an unfamiliar entity to most families in the area, Esformes has offered vouchers to families for 80 percent of tuition for the first two years as an incentive to enroll their children. It's something Esformes doesn't talk about, Ezagui says, because "he does a lot of things privately, discreetly, things that nobody even knows about. He is obsessed with giving children a Jewish education. He works hard, and he doesn't even have to work, for one reason: to give more money to Jewish education."

For himself and his community, Ezagui says, the events of the last five years prove "that there's a G-d in heaven that could send an angel like Morris."

Esformes himself says that even he was amazed at what his plan helped to accomplish in Ormand Beach, right up to the design of the synagogue. "It's very Mediterranean, Italian-French, how shuls were built 200 or 300 years ago, with stained glass windows, high ceilings, chandeliers. We don't have a synagogue like this in Chicago," he says.

Even more important, "this is the first of its kind. This is going to change the dynamics of Judaism in northern Florida," he predicts.

Now Esformes has embarked on a new project in a community that could hardly be more different from Florida's. He's funding two new projects in Anchorage, Alaska: the Alaska Jewish Historical Museum and Community Center and a separate facility that will include a synagogue, preschool and day school connected to the Lubavitch Center of Alaska.

It started with a request from a family friend who lives in Anchorage. A group had conceived the idea of opening an Alaska Jewish Museum, designed to expose both Jewish and non-Jewish Alaskans to the significant Jewish contribution to the state. Members began fund-raising in 2004 and raised $750,000, which was augmented by an $850,000 grant from the state of Alaska.

This took place in an unusual community that's home to about 6,000 Jews statewide. Most live in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, with small pockets scattered elsewhere throughout the state. Anchorage has a community of 3,000, many of them assimilated, and the only two full-time functioning synagogues in the state, one Reform and one connected with the Lubavitch Chabad movement, according to Rabbi Yosef Greenberg. He and his wife have run the Anchorage Chabad center for 17 years.

So it might come as a surprise to some to discover that Alaska has a robust Jewish history. It was Jewish fur traders in San Francisco who originally came up with the idea of purchasing Alaska from Russia 140 years ago, and they played a major role in the purchase itself. The first mayors of Anchorage and Fairbanks were Jewish, as were many of the gold rush pioneers at the beginning of the 20th century.

The new museum will also include exhibits on the role played by Alaska Airlines in Operation Magic Carpet, which airlifted more than 40,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1948. (A gala dinner will mark the 60th anniversary of the operation in Anchorage in November.) And it was a young Alaskan sailor, Jack Johnson, who performed heroically in helping to smuggle Holocaust survivors into Israel aboard the ship Exodus. Johnson, who served as second mate on the historic ship, attended a fund-raiser for the museum last year.

The fund-raising group also honored novelist Michael Chabon, whose latest book, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," tells the fictional story of a group of Jews who immigrated to Alaska after the Holocaust. It's based on an idea that was discussed in the U.S. Congress during World War II in which large groups of European Jews would be resettled in Alaska.

That didn't happen, but today the community, though small, is vibrant, Rabbi Greenberg said in a phone conversation. At his son's recent bar mitzvah, the 250 guests included Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens as well as the city's mayor, numerous state legislators and the rabbi of the Reform temple. Sen. Joe Lieberman sent a videotaped tribute. Many of the speeches were in Yiddish with English translations projected on a screen.

The community's annual Chanukah celebration draws more than 1,000 guests, and year-round some 250 Jewish families regularly connect to some aspect of the Jewish community, from synagogue services to Sunday school to day camp to Alaska's only mikvah.

"Our community was ready and waiting. We just didn't have the physical means to invest in this kind of commitment, to make that ultimate transformation," Greenberg says. "For 17 years, we have worked step by step, but until you have a building of your own, the community can't see the transformation. That puts a face to it, makes a statement that you are here to stay forever."

That statement is important because when he and his wife arrived 17 years ago, no one believed they would stay in a cold, remote state where there were few committed Jews, he says.

That's where Rabbi Esformes comes in. When fund-raising efforts for the museum stalled, the family friends contacted him and he visited Anchorage in early June with his longtime associate, Rabbi Gerry Rosenberg. They were greeted at the airport by a contingent of 70 children from a Jewish day camp, then whisked off to a reception with government and Jewish leaders where they heard a presentation about the growth of Anchorage's Jewish community.

Esformes was impressed. "They're no different from Daytona Beach," he says. "The reality happens to be that they have a community there which could support 65 to 70 children in a Jewish day school, and it could change the dynamics of an entire community."

He quickly pledged to help fund the museum and Jewish center, which will include a synagogue, preschool and day school. One already existing building will be remodeled and another one has just been purchased. Rabbi Greenberg thinks it will be at least another year before both facilities are complete.

But when that happens, it will transform the community, he says. "With Rabbi Esformes' commitment, it brings it all together. Now we have different institutions all over the city. This puts it all under one roof. What he is doing is huge. It could be a model for other small towns.

"Not too many donors could appreciate the vision of what could be done in a city like Anchorage. Most people would give up," he says.

Greenberg is especially impressed that Esformes would invest in a city where "his grandchildren will never benefit from this. He'll never live here. It says something about his neshama (soul) that he feels the need in a place that is so far" from major Jewish population centers.

"Investing money in another yeshiva in Chicago, in New York is important, every Jewish kid is important, but to go to a small community, especially to a place like us (sends the message that) Jews in Anchorage are of equal importance to Jews in Chicago or New York," Greenberg says. "It is the true loving kindness of a fellow Jew you may never have seen from the other side of the world."

The plans for the new facilities "have injected such excitement, such life" into the community, from the Reform temple to the Chabad center and everything in between, he says.

Esformes, meanwhile, gives equal praise to the Chabad rabbis and their wives in the two small communities as the ones who began the process of uniting the Jews there. His own role, he says, was carved out by destiny.

"These were communities that were starving for something like this," he says. "The truth is, I was just G-d's messenger boy."