Schools and Beyond

“Kids today need this interactive format,” Aaron says. “They’re born with screens in their hands. They’re used to the dopamine rush of digital content and absorbing information on a screen. It’s hard for schools with the old frontal method of teaching to compete with that; for kids, that’s antiquated.

“This is our weapon, a way to bridge the gap between timeless Judaism and modern life. Kids love VR — it’s a portal to another dimension. For the twenty minutes of each segment, we have students’ undivided attention, with zero distractions.”

Aaron notes that for students who don’t learn well from books, TorahVR is a more effective way to absorb information.

“My brother struggled in school because he has different skills,” Aaron says. “Today he’s a very sought-after, high-end builder and carpenter, but as a teen he was pegged as ‘not successful’ because he was mostly judged by his academic grades, which are a poor litmus test of success in life. Students like that represent about half of every class — maybe even more these days.”

Schools who sign on for TorahVR aren’t simply handed headsets and software; they receive a text curriculum and student source sheet, based on the Tzivos Hashem Yahadus books (which have a haskamah from Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky).

Dealing with a large variety of schools is a challenge unto itself. “Each school is its own beast,” Aaron admits. “School bureaucracies can be challenging, with boards and multiple decision makers, and the occasional person who is anti-tech in any form. But we think every school should have access to this. Sometimes we propose starting with a few headsets in the library for recess or rainy days. And we don’t want money to get in the way of chinuch. If a school really wants TorahVR but is truly strapped, we’ll work with them for a discount or payment plan.”

Nivra has also begun to offer non-Torah content for Jewish schools, particularly in the area of STEM instruction. “We scoured the markets, had hundreds of meetings, selected the best content, and negotiated contracts,” Aaron says. One school in Crown Heights bought 30 headsets for secular studies. Another had a 1,200-minute lab requirement for some science classes, but no money to install a science lab.

“Instead of investing 100,000 dollars in a lab, they spent 50,000 on headsets, and it fulfilled the requirements,” Aaron says. “Nivra’s bread and butter is Torah, but many Jewish schools are also using the STEM materials, where students can virtually dissect a frog or mix chemicals.”

Many Christian schools have expressed interest in the TVR depiction of “Solomon’s Temple,” but since they wanted to include their deity, this was a nonstarter. “Our first focus is Jews,” Aaron says. “We could maybe market parshah to non-Jews, but we cannot otherwise cater to them.”

Nivra now attracts contracts from a wide range of sources. “A Jewish youth organization associated with the Technion approached us with a large contract to create content for them on Israeli innovation,” Aaron says. “They want a twenty-five minute presentation about Israeli innovation, with ‘Einstein’ leading a tour through Israeli inventions such as prosthetics, cellphones, and the Iron Dome.”

Aaron was even approached by an Israeli real estate company that wants to do VR house tours. The Thank You Hashem team, which has created two-dimensional videos to date, has expressed interest in doing some in VR. Aaron was approached by a man from Buenos Aires who built a VR experience of mikvaos all over the world, from ancient times to the present, which he hopes to share with Chabad Houses everywhere. TVR will help develop it further and add it to their platform.

“There’s even a potential US government contract,” Aaron says. “But I’m not allowed to say much about it beyond the fact that it would involve trainings for pilots.”

Roots Replanted

Aaron comes from a family with deep roots both in Chabad and Australia. His great-great-great-grandmother on his mother’s side was Rebbetzin Menucha Rochel Slonim of Chevron, a daughter of Rebbe Dov Ber — the Mitteler Rebbe of Chabad (and a granddaughter of the Alter Rebbe). Aaron’s great-grandfather, her grandson, moved from Chevron to Australia, the first Lubavitcher chassid to do so, possibly on shlichus to the Jewish men who flocked there during the Australian Gold Rush of 1851. He traveled to Victoria and built up a shul and a community in Ballarat, raising funds for the poor of Eretz Yisrael.

Aaron’s paternal grandparents, survivors of the Shoah, had “somewhat rejected” Hashem but nevertheless kept a traditional home, sending his father to a Chabad school. (“It might have been the cheapest tuition,” he ventures.) Years later, after Aaron’s father married his mother, who came from a traditional family, a Chabad shaliach knocked on their door in Melbourne asking him to come complete a minyan. Little by little, he began returning to the fold.

Aaron’s parents were married for many years without children, and after his father reconnected to Chabad, he visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe to ask for a brachah. The Rebbe gave him the brachah after extracting a promise that the couple would observe Jewish family laws, and shortly afterward, Aaron’s older brother was born. Aaron followed two years later, in 1993.

The boys first attended Mizrachi schools, but later transferred to Chabad schools, where both became inspired, drawing the family to higher levels of observance. Aaron continued on the Chabad path, spending a couple of years in the Tomchei Temimim yeshivah in Brunoy, France, and then in Los Angeles with “the Rosh” (Rabbi Ezra Binyamin Shochet) at Yeshivas Ohr Elchonon Chabad (“Litvish learning with a Chabad hashkafah,” Aaron explains).

After that he moved on to Ohalei Torah in Crown Heights. “In your last year there, if you’ve earned it, they send you on shlichus,” he says. “I found my name on a list to go to Kingsley Way, London, as a senior teacher and mentor.” He wasn’t excited about the placement, but some of the connections he made there later produced providential. It was in London that he met Yisi Fehler, who eventually became the CTO and cofounder of Nivra.

From London he was sent to the Venetian Islands in Florida for a year to serve as an assistant rabbi in a Chabad House, while passing his tests for semichah. Some of the community members he got to know later became finance clients.

Midas Touch

From an early age, Aaron had a knack for understanding money. His father had a small business selling educational resources, and  Aaron would pepper him with questions about the way the world ran. “How can people on salaries possibly afford these large houses?” he would ask as they walked along a well-appointed street.

When his father explained that some people made money investing in the stock market, little Aaron was fascinated. After his bar mitzvah, his parents let him use some of his gift money to open a trading account. By age 15, while working at a pizza store for 13 dollars an hour, he skipped a class at school to run home and sell a stock for a 30 percent increase, making $1,000 in half an hour. “I was hooked,” he said.

When he left for beis medrash  he put his investing schemes on hold, opting to concentrate single-mindedly on his learning. It wasn’t until after he’d finished his semichah that he got a call from a man he’d known in Melbourne as a teen, a Chabad hedge fund manager who had been impressed by the young man’s grasp of finance and markets.

“We used to chat about financial markets, and he told me to be in touch when I finished learning,” Aaron says. Now this friend made good on his promise, offering Aaron a job in New York, flying him there, and providing him with an apartment in Crown Heights.

Six years after they’d first met, Aaron started his first professional job with Dali Capital, which he describes as a “garage hedge fund — only 50 million dollars — and the first publicly traded company to enter the crypto space.”

Aaron caught on quickly and was soon managing a biotech portfolio. He also became involved in venture capital.

“I got a taste of capital markets, and I learned about back door deals,” he says. “And I saw how easy it is to make money if you’re in the right industries.” Before long he had been transferred to Los Angeles and was enjoying a carefree, lucrative life.

The sense that he was living the dream was shaken up when he got into a car accident that should have killed him but didn’t.

“It was Erev Shabbos, and some friends and I were rushing from a pre-Shabbos farbrengen to our host. We’d pushed the limits and were running late,” he relates. “It was  raining, and the other driver was reckless. We narrowly missed hitting a truck, and our car was totaled.

“We all should have died, but none of us were injured beyond a broken elbow. In those few seconds, as we saw the crash coming — those moments when your life passes before your eyes. What I experienced was a flash of purpose: What have I accomplished? What do I still need to do?”

In retrospect, he thinks they might have been driving after shkiah, even though none of them had ever been mechallel Shabbos in their lives. “It was like Hashem was telling us, ‘If you won’t stop for Shabbos, I’ll stop you.’ ”

The psychological jolt of looking death in the face led him to reevaluate his priorities. Shortly afterward, he left Dali to open a startup of his own, one that would pay forward his own good fortune. Having advised so many people informally in the basics of financial and investing literacy, he envisioned creating an app and a platform to help people get started. He began looking for investors and developers, and soon had several full-time employees, from data engineers and tech experts to marketing professionals. He maintained an office in Malibu, California, continuing to live in the Valley.

But money has never been the core of Aaron’s sense of fulfillment. He remembers one evening in December of 2017, as he drove home from Malibu to the Valley in his 20-year-old Mercedes wagon.

“I was on the road amid breathtaking scenery, the hills on one side of me and the Pacific on the other,” he says. “My stock was then worth ten million dollars, and I was thinking, I’ve made it! I’m worth a ton of money! But it didn’t make me feel fulfilled. On the other hand, I had no desire to pull out and retire. I knew there was more I wanted to do.”

In the meantime, his startup had become immensely stressful. Aaron was living on minimal sleep and maximal stress. At one dark moment, he reached out to an investor, who connected him to  the Crypto Company. Crypto offered to buy him out with cash and equity and employ him in a senior position. Aaron accepted the exit gratefully, happy to take the win even if he’d be losing his chance to own a billion dollar app.

He left after a year, in 2019, to work on his own in venture capital. That year he also married his wife Sarah, in a wedding in his ancestors’ city of Chevron, and took a year off to live in Eretz Yisrael and teach in Maayanot, a yeshivah for baalei teshuvah.

Then Covid shut down the world, and his wife wanted to be near her family in Crown Heights. The new couple packed their bags and returned to the States.

Torah Startup

It was during Covid, with its inherent down time, that Aaron had time to think about a long-dormant passion. He had always been drawn to outreach and chinuch, having spent some years teaching in Chabad Houses and at Maayanot. One of his dreams involved bringing Torah to life for young people in a virtual reality format.

His first idea was to create a VR experience of Bereishis in a game-style, interactive format. He began testing the ground by reaching out to people, from financiers to Jewish educational organizations to developers.

One of these people was a young man named Yisi (Yisroel) Fehler, whom he’d met during his shlichus in London. At the time Yisi was in mesivta, but now he was doing 3-D animations posted on social media. Aaron got in touch and asked him to point him in the right direction. “Speak to Naftali Charter,” he suggested. “I work with him at his Torah Visuals company.”

Naftali is a former IDF special forces sniper and security expert who had started the Torah Visual company to animate concepts from Tanya and Kabbalah. Aaron reached out to him, and shortly afterward, on a balmy June evening in 2020, the two men sat on the rooftop of Aaron’s home in Crown Heights, enjoying an aperitif of whiskey and herring. Naftali had established Torah Visuals to bring Torah to life in a 2-D, high-quality visual way, but VR was not yet on his radar. Both acknowledged that while many people already had the idea for animation (Torah Live, Aleph Beta, and Hidabroot were already using animation to teach Torah), “VR is next-level.”

They were excited to collaborate. They agreed that Torah Visuals would help produce and direct some VR segments over the next year, and they would also find rabbinical supervision to ensure accuracy and legitimacy.

About six months later, Aaron went to California for a meeting with some venture capital clients and partners. One of them was a company that manufactured for the military, and he also hoped to speak to them about producing chips for TorahVR headsets. In order for them to be “educationally secure” for yeshivahs, they would need to design them in such a way that they could not be used to access the internet for anything but TVR use.

(At the beginning, Aaron explains, the Nivra team had to take special screwdrivers to open up the motherboards in the headsets to prevent users from accessing other internet content. As of a year ago, Nivra partnered with Meta to do the adjustments at the factory level, eliminating the need for physical adjustments.)

The next day, he showed up along with another investor, an apparently nonobservant Jew. Blue-blooded Lubavitcher that he is, Aaron asked, “Have you put on tefillin?” To his surprise, the man replied that he had. “Okay, we can get the day started then,” Aaron said.

They began chatting, and when Aaron shared that he was working on  Torah visuals on the side, the man’s eyes lit up. “Let’s do dinner,” he said. Aaron had to decline — he had a previous engagement. “Then after dinner!” his new friend said.

“I have my flight home after that,” Aaron said.

“Then I’m sending you something you must see,” the man declared.

What he sent Aaron was a 15-minute visual segment about the Exodus, produced by someone in Israel. “Wait,” Aaron said, “Who are you?”

His new friend turned out to be Ari Globus, the youngest son of Hollywood producer Yoram Globus, an Israeli filmmaker who teamed up with his cousin, artistic director Menachem Golan, to produce films that evolved from small films to blockbusters. His father had just raised $15 million and earmarked a few million for Torah. “Let’s work together,” he said.

They began negotiations before Purim, signing a final contract Motzaei Simchas Torah that poured the first million dollars into TorahVR.

“My major wins have always been around the Jewish holidays,” Aaron comments. “The money came through on the fifth day of Chanukah, and Nivra was born.”

Launch to Infinity

Aaron partnered with Tzivos Hashem to begin creating content, choosing to start  with the 613 mitzvos. The TVR team began with the mitzvos of the Beis Hamikdash, “because it’s so intangible,” Aaron says. “We wanted our participants to be able to be able to ‘walk around’ the Beis Hamikdash, light the Menorah, carry things like the Lechem Hapanim, put ingredients into the Ketores, and place poles on the Aron.” (The least interactive segment is Bereishis, since, as Aaron attests, “In that one, Hashem does pretty much everything.”)

Torah Visuals provided artists and developers. Aaron began with 12 full-time employees, but currently uses six-plus part-timers and some third-party teams paid per project.

“The artists take a concept, sketch it on an iPad, and it goes to an artistic director who begins to code the character or asset to be able to give to the animator,” Aaron explains.  “There are scriptwriters who comb through dozens of seforim for the content, and gaming developers to develop the interactive content. At the beginning, for example, we wanted people to light the Menorah in the Beis Hamikdash, where it was lit every day. We know it was not lit in the same way we light on Chanukah, and that each flame was lit from the other. We had to go to sources such as Josephus to figure it out, and where there are multiple opinions, we have to figure out which one to go with.”

A Tzivos Hashem team goes over all the content to ensure accuracy. “Everything must be defensible. The kids take what they see as canonical,” Aaron says. “We try to be as mainstream as possible. One Manhattan yeshivah asked us, ‘How do we know you’re not giving us Chabad content?’ I answered, ‘Our content is based on the Rambam. He lived one thousand years before Chabad existed.’”

As the team began producing material, TorahVR gained traction. A clip posted on social media went viral after it was picked up by a movie producer-turned-observant Jew who has millions of followers.

At that point, in 2022, Aaron was still involved in venture capital for high-net-worth clients, running his own funds. But he realized that if TVR was to succeed, it would need his active, full-time involvement, and he would have to take a giant step back from finance. Was this a cause worth pursuing, given the financial sacrifices?

He decided to throw the decision on his wife. “Her name is Sarah, and as Hashem advised Avraham to listen to his wife Sarah, I followed suit,” he says. “I told her, I can stay in VC and we’ll have lots of money, or I can devote myself to TVR and we’ll have to scale back on luxuries. Her response was, ‘If you have the opportunity to spread Torah and still make some parnassah from it, I’m in.’ ”

For the past four years, TVR has been Aaron’s day job, although he still does some buying and selling on the side. After a strong cup of coffee and davening, he sifts through emails from clients, content creators or potential customers. He reaches out to new clients and invites people with VR experience to create Torah experiences, offering payment if the content is used. He’s in touch with his team and the rabbinical team and reviews the latest script. He does a lot of fundraising as well, seeking sponsors for various projects. He conducts demos all over the Tristate area, often appearing with 50 or 60 headsets and doing demos with 300 to 400 students per day. Over 40 segments are now available for customers.

Since its launch, TVR has been adopted by over 100 schools in eight countries, including Panama, Argentina, and Israel. Every month new schools sign on, from Reform and Conservative day schools to Lakewood yeshivahs. Aaron estimates that 100,000 to 200,000 students are using TVR regularly, and talks have begun with the Misrad Hachinuch in Israel about translating the content into Hebrew.

The very first person who stepped inside a TVR experience outside the immediate team was singer Avraham Fried, who was filmed for a clip showing him experiencing the Beis Hamikdash segment.

“We had him take his shoes off, as he’s a Kohein, and Kohanim can’t wear shoes inside the Beis Hamikdash,” Aaron says.

Fried loved the experience. “It was absolutely mindboggling,” he raved. “Back in the day, there wasn’t much to see. So we had to hear. Today the kids want to see: Show me!

“But this is a whole new level,” he avowed. “It will capture the imagination of children like nothing before.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1103)