Arieh was born in 1924 to Ozer Baruch and Friva Simon in Târgu Frumos, Romania. He was the lone son after seven daughters. The family was Religious Zionist, warm and loving. Arieh’s sister, who made aliyah with her husband and daughter, sent certificates in 1935 to her parents, Arieh and the two sisters below age fourteen. Another sister made aliyah as an agricultural trainee. In Romania, another three sisters remained who survived the Holocaust and made aliyah.

In the Land of Israel, the family lived in the Florentine neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Arieh studied in the Balfour elementary school and then in the Montefiore Gymnasium as evening classes. Arieh was also a member of the Scouts, and he protested the White Paper.

In 1941, at age 17, Arieh joined the underground with Lehi. He served in Department 6, the intelligence divisions, in the railroad branch. Avraham “Yoel” Baharav was his supervisor. He gathered information from the station managers about the British trains from Egypt to Palestine. He also would copy maps he stole from the British at night. Arieh also had an arms cache, a pistol which he kept in the family home.

In 1947, Arieh was accepted to the civil engineering program at Columbia University in New York; for this, he was discharged from Lehi. After the Partition Plan was announced, Arieh enlisted in the IDF and delayed his studies. He served in the War of Independence in the Supply Corps, with the rank of sergeant first class. In 1949, he was released, along with other students who had halted their studies to fight. He then travelled to New York to get his degree at Columbia in civil engineering.

In 1952, Arieh met his future wife, Gisele Spolter, a Holocaust survivor from Poland who was studying social work at Columbia. They had a son (Amihud Israel) and two daughters (Friva Hannah and Ziva Yona). They married, respectively, Eitana, Natan and Yonatan; Gisele and Arieh had seven granddaughters and one grandson. Amihud and Ziva live with their families in Israel, while Friva lives in New York with her family. Her daughter Shoshana made aliya in 2015.

Gisele died in 2011 and was buried in Beit Shemesh. Arieh then returned to Israel. He lives near his daughter in Raanana.