Like many Soviet Jews of his generation, Ary Rotman was eager to leave the Soviet Union but was repeatedly denied the right to do so. It was not until the early 1970s that he, his wife, and their young son were finally able to leave the country. They eventually settled in Boston where he worked in a department store before taking a job at an insurance company. As emigration from the Soviet Union grew in the 1980s and 1990s, he became the founding president of a new organization in Boston—the Russian Jewish Community Foundation.