If you’ve ever sent dollars to an Israeli bank account, you may have noticed that not only did you not get prompt access to your money, but there was also a 2- 3% charge on the transaction. The universal reaction to this has been, There must be a better way.
There is. Enter Aryeh Simon’s Adar Global, which helps people wire money to Israel and have it available the next day—and at a lower fee.
Adar Global handles wires of hundreds of millions of dollars. They also run six physical check cashing and currency exchange locations throughout Israel called Change 86.
Aryeh studied in kollel for many years and became a businessman “later” in life—although he is a relatively young man. We discussed his journey, the money changing business in Israel and the very intriguing method he developed to help himself learn more Torah. Try it; it might help you, too!
—Nesanel
I was born and raised in LA, the fourth of five siblings. My parents both became baalei teshuvah while in college, and they both became professors of mathematics. My father entered Harvard at 16 years old and then got his PhD from Princeton, where he was on the faculty for about ten years before moving to CalTech (California Institute of Technology), where he was the head of the math department for close to 40 years. He is a mathematical physicist, which, as he likes to joke, means that to the mathematicians he was a physicist, and to the physicists he was a mathematician.
“My mother grew up in Chicago. Her father, a chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project. She went to UCLA and then to Princeton for graduate school, where she met my father.
“My father traveled the world giving lectures on math; my friends were jealous of me, since they assumed he helped me with my math homework, but he never did. My father published nearly 400 scientific papers and authored 21 books on very complicated topics. Once I asked him if I would understand anything in his latest book. He thought for a minute and said, ‘Yeah, the dedication page,’ with the utmost seriousness.
“My mother stayed home to raise us, and when we were a little older she taught math in local high schools and colleges. We grew up comfortably, but my parents were very frugal. The one thing they considered worth spending money on was the local day schools. In their own quiet way, with no fanfare, they were big supporters.
“My father liked the mehalech of Rav Yaakov Krause, rav of Young Israel of Hancock Park; we moved to be close to his shul. I attended Toras Emes and then Valley Torah, and after high school I went to Toras Moshe (ToMo) in Eretz Yisrael for two years.
“I was always a bit entrepreneurial. In fourth grade, I bought candies at a discounted price and resold them from my locker. In high school, I was busy with my studies and basketball, but I still found time to buy bagels by the dozen and sell them individually for breakfast in school. In the summers I worked as a waiter in Camp Avraham Chaim Heller in the Catskills.
“After my first zman in Eretz Yisrael, I realized that there were almost no American products there. I loved Tangy Taffies, so when I went to the States to visit, I bought 70 pounds of Tangy Taffies and brought them back to Israel, where I sold them to other bachurim. I made enough money to buy a lot of sefarim. Someone once told me, “Buy as many sefarim as you can when you’re a bachur, because once you’re married and in kollel, you’ll need your money for milk and bread.”
“After Eretz Yisrael, I went to Ner Yisroel in Baltimore for three years. My parents wanted me to get a college degree, so in the summers, I worked on a master of education at Loyola University in Chicago through an expedited program called JELI (Jewish Education Leadership Institute). After I got my master’s, I went back to Eretz Yisrael to learn in the Mir, and eventually I was introduced to my wife.
“Her family moved to Eretz Yisrael from Toronto when she was ten years old. As a teenager, she wanted to become a physician’s assistant, but there were no programs for that in Israel, so she went to a high school in South Bend, Indiana, for 12th grade and then to TI in Chicago. After she graduated, she came back to Israel and our shidduch happened.
“My older brother also married an Israeli. My father is on the board of governors of the Technion, and he was also lecturing at Hebrew University; my parents basically lived in Israel half the year.
“During our first year of marriage, I learned in the Mir, and we lived in Ramat Eshkol. I thought our lives would be easier back in the US, but after we visited America for Pesach, we decided to stay in Israel.
“We moved to Beitar in 2007. The commute to the Mir was too difficult, so I found a local English-speaking kollel on my block, and I learned there for six years.
“We couldn’t live on my kollel salary. At that time there was no kosher mehadrin sushi in Israel, so I made that my business: I taught myself to make sushi through videos. Early Thursday mornings I would make the sushi, and at night I would sell it at different seminaries and yeshivos. I netted 1,000 shekels a week from this.
“To supplement this income, I also worked some night jobs, but by 2012, I knew I needed a bigger, steady parnasah. I received an email from someone looking to hire a manager for a money changing business he was opening. I didn’t have much experience in the financial sector, but numbers were in my blood. And I clicked with the job.”
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