‘A note to God’ & a sad farewell: Frank Lowy’s wife Shirley and her Alzheimer’s battle

The whirlwind romance between the Bondi girl and the billionaire began in 1952 and ended almost five decades later with Shirley’s passing at their Tel Aviv home.

It was the tragic end to a love story that began in 1952 when Holocaust survivor Pinhas Levy met a sparkling 19-year-old Bondi girl at a Jewish dance in Sydney.

Levy, now better known as businessman and philanthropist Sir Frank Lowy, married Shirley after a whirlwind romance which lasted until last week when she died aged 86 at their Tel Aviv home.

One of Australia’s richest men, Sir Frank in 2017 sold Westfield, the international shopping centre empire he created, for $33 billion and has been nursing his beloved wife at home as she struggled with Alzheimer’s disease over the past five years.

He encapsulated the sadness of every family dealing with the destructive disease in a scene in the film about his life, What Will Become of Us, which showed him slipping a prayer into the cracks of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.

Frank Lowy and wife Shirley years ago.

Sir Frank Lowy in the Foxtel documentary, What Will Become of Us. Picture: Supplied/Foxtel

“I am writing a note. To God. To look after my wife,” he says in the film which screened at last year’s Sydney Film Festival. “No amount of prayers will help me or her, just maybe make it a bit easier.”

The family revealed in a statement released on Saturday night that Lady Lowy had died on December 9.

Sir Frank and Lady Lowy have three sons, as well as 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

“Her loss to us is immense and will be deeply felt forever,’’ the family said. “While she never sought a role in our family’s involvement in corporate life, she provided the secure base on which it was built. She kept us conscious of the most important things in life. We will always honour her memory and take some small comfort in the fact that the good she did touched thousands of lives.”

Sir Frank Lowy in What Will Become of Us. Picture: Supplied/Foxtel

The couple’s first son David was born 10 months after they married and in 1958. Frank Lowy and fellow immigrant John Saunders then took their delicatessen business and ­created Westfield.

As pillars of Australia’s Jewish community, the couple were generous philanthropists.

The rock behind her billionaire husband, Lady Lowy completed an arts degree after their three sons had grown up.

Born Shirley Anne in April 1934, she was hands-on in the charities she set up including The Chai ­Foundation, which helped struggling Jewish families, while funding scholarships at Moriah College, a private school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and houses in Israel for children from troubled families.

Sir Frank was the epitome of the rags-to-riches Australian migrant dream but it was not until they had been married for 30 years that he opened up to his wife with details of his horrific past as a child of the Holocaust, revealing how his father disappeared one day, taken to Auschwitz and beaten to death by the Germans.

Frank Lowy with wife Shirley Lowy at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2015.

In 2017 when Sir Frank was knighted, his wife was too ill to join him in London.

Since 2018, they had spent all of their time in their Tel Aviv apartment block which overlooks the ocean.

“It was maybe six to 12 months when she was sick, and was not sick, and you were hoping, running to doctors, making inquiries whether there is a cure or no cure,” Sir Frank said in What Will Become of Us.

“Nights are really very difficult because she goes to bed between 7 and 8 o’clock and then I don’t exactly know what to do with myself.

“As her memory recedes more and more, I want to hold on to my own.”