Using what Hashem gives you

The follow was posted on the Areivim list by SBA and I felt it important to post here after getting permission for the orginal poster. A feel good story doesn’t hurt once in a while.

Paul Guez, Denim King, Bounces Back From Cocaine, Bankruptcy
(Bloomberg News) http://tinyurl.com/nxr74

“…Guez had unloaded the inventory on the Value City department store chain, owned by his friends, the Schottenstein clan of Columbus, Ohio. Following the sale in 1992, Guez got a life- changing proposition from patriarch Jerome Schottenstein, then 66. “I was broke, basically, and he says, `Paul, I would like you to participate in a charity. You have to pay $100,000,”’ Guez says. The charity was to pay for a new English translation of the Talmud, the sacred Jewish text. “I’m sure he knew I was broke,” Guez says of Schottenstein. “Then he sent a rabbi to make me sign a contract for $100,000. My wife exploded laughing, `Like from where?’ I didn’t know from where, but I did it.”
The “where” turned out to be the Schottensteins themselves. Soon after Guez agreed to make the donation, Jerome Schottenstein gave him an order for 12,000 pairs of jeans for Schottenstein’s Warrendale, Pennsylvania-based American Eagle Outfitters Inc. — enough to cover Guez’s donation. That was followed by an order for 650,000 pairs. To finance the product, Schottenstein lent Guez $500,000. “I didn’t even have a bank account,” Guez says.
After Schottenstein’s death in 1992, his son Jay sold Guez 1 million shares of American Eagle for $12 a share when the stock was trading at $16, even arranging a line of credit to finance the $12 million purchase price. The stock soared to more than $70 by 1999, making a now sober Guez wealthy again. “The family strongly believes the more you give, the more you get,” Schottenstein spokesman Michael Broidy says. “Good things happen if you do good things.”

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