Hershey Friedman, the owner of one of Israel’s largest home developers, likes to say he doesn’t actually have a home himself.

“I live on airplanes,” the 75-year-old Montreal-born billionaire said with a dry smile in a recent interview with The Times of Israel in his Tel Aviv office. “I leave every Sunday, and usually get back Thursday night or Friday morning.”

The Orthodox entrepreneur divides his time between Israel, Montreal and Florida. But it is Israel where he has placed one of his biggest bets.

Friedman is the controlling shareholder of Azorim, one of Israel’s largest publicly traded real estate developers. Fifteen years after he acquired the company, which was then near bankruptcy, he is now looking to help shape a housing market defined by soaring prices, urban renewal and growing rental demand.

“I love Israel, but it’s a challenging country to work in,” Friedman said, as he laid out his plans to expand in Jerusalem and in other fields of operation. “I like to think that I’m involved in much more than just real estate.”

Friedman began developing his business instincts as a child in Montreal, when he would offer to fetch construction workers their lunch orders in exchange for tips and deposit refunds on their empty bottles.

Friedman’s parents owned a textile company, but the family was plunged into crisis when he was 10 years old. His father was injured in a serious car accident that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, leaving his mother to manage all the family’s needs.

When Friedman and his two brothers were old enough, they were sent to learn Torah at yeshivas in New York and Baltimore. The others continued studying after graduating from college, but Friedman dove straight into the business world, running the family business and eventually selling it in 1981.

“I did very well on that sale, so I decided to retire,” Friedman recalled. “But who retires at 31 years old? I lasted two weeks, and then I started looking for companies to buy.”

Friedman acquired a struggling plastics packaging business and implemented a massive rehabilitation plan, the first of the maneuvers that would earn him a reputation as a corporate turnaround specialist. In the years that followed, he would go on to acquire some two dozen more companies in the same industry and develop one of the largest plastics operations in North America.

Friedman began investing in Israeli real estate almost by accident. After his oldest son came to Israel at age 18 to learn in yeshiva, Friedman found himself flying over so frequently that it made sense to invest here. His first real estate venture had some failures, but a garden development he led in Jerusalem’s Motza neighborhood is a “trophy” that he is still proud of today, he said.

Then came Azorim. The company, founded in 1964, had once been Israel’s premier residential developer, but by the time Friedman began looking at it, the company was careening toward bankruptcy after overextending itself with projects in India, Canada, and Latin America.

“They were all over the place,” Friedman recalled. “The company felt out of control.”

With the help of a loan from United Mizrahi Bank, Friedman acquired Azorim on the verge of insolvency, buying 64 percent of the business for NIS 300 million ($96.3 million) from ultra-Orthodox real estate magnate Shaya Boymelgreen. It was 2011, when housing prices had risen 50% over just four years, and just months before hundreds of thousands of Israelis would take to the streets to protest the high cost of living.

Buying a distressed company at such a precarious time wasn’t........

© The Times of Israel