One year after a deadly shooting, Moishe Dovid Ferencz is back behind the counter

Photos: Itzik Roytman and Naftoli Goldgrab

Exactly a year after last December’s deadly attack on the small, close-knit Satmar community in Jersey City — when domestic terrorists opened fire on the Jersey City Kosher Market, killing owner Moishe Dovid Ferencz’s wife Leah Mindel (Mindy), her cousin, and a store employee  — Ferencz is focusing on the light that's illuminating his darkened world

Colleagues in the kosher supermarket world couldn’t bring back his loved ones, but they banded together to do what they could for one of their own: rebuild his business.

The Olive Branch grocery opened its doors less than three months after Jersey City Kosher Market was boarded up by police — a new dawn in relationships between the Greenville neighborhood’s multiracial residents, who were horrified by the attack, and the growing number of chassidic families who have moved into the area in recent years.

A team of supermarket activists made sure the new store’s gleaming shelves were adequately filled with rows of heimishe groceries, plenty of chalav Yisrael dairy products, and enough varieties of chrein and dips to ensure that every member of Jersey City’s fledgling Jewish enclave could purchase their favorite Shabbos foods locally, just as Moishe Dovid envisioned when he set up JC Kosher.

Building a Community

When the Ferenczes initially followed friends to Jersey City in 2015, Moishe Dovid had a well-paying job in the nearby town of Old Bridge. But after a year, he realized that the growing community needed a full-time grocery, so he gave up his steady job and jumped into a new career.

Jersey City Kosher Market was a store unlike any other in the area. A cross between a mom-and-pop market and a casual restaurant, it offered groceries and had a take-out and dine-in section, a salad and sandwich bar, and fresh-baked challah and goodies for Shabbos, everything somehow condensed into a store so narrow that customers barely had room to turn around.

But it didn’t take long for two radical black supremacists to destroy the business Ferencz had worked so hard to build. On December 10, 2019, David Anderson and Francine Graham fired a spray of bullets into the grocery as they emerged from their white U-Haul shortly after gunning down Detective Joseph Seals in a local cemetery a few blocks away, the hail of bullets continuing for what seemed like an eternity. An hours-long shootout with tactical police reinforcements ensued, and when the dust had cleared, the deadly toll became painfully clear: Mindy Ferencz and her cousin Moshe Hersh Deitsch had lost their lives in the grocery, while Moshe Hersh’s cousin Chaim Deitsch, who had been grabbing a bite to eat with friend Chaim Lax, escaped with a gunshot to his stomach. Lax was pushed out the back door to safety by employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, who was fatally shot, while Lax managed to flee unscathed.