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| Magazine Feature |

A Branch Extended

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.

 

In the aftermath of the shooting, as the market lay in ruins and their heartbreaking loss left the Ferencz family reeling, the top brass at Evergreen Kosher Market reached out to their colleagues at Gourmet Glatt and Seasons, all of whom had already been contemplating what they could possibly do in the face of the devastating attack. Having come together numerous times in the past to help each other when adversity struck, the three supermarkets were ready and willing to shoulder the responsibility of setting up a new grocery in Jersey City, providing residents with easy access to kosher products and gifting Ferencz with the opportunity to have his parnassah restored.

“We knew we would never be able to fill the loss of life, but we could give him something that would help him to go forward,” explains Evergreen’s Chesky Kauftheil. “We have the knowledge, the experience, and the connections in this business, and it was clear that we could speed this up and recreate a store in Jersey City that would offer a quality shopping experience.”

They weren’t the only ones contemplating Ferencz’s future as he and his children sat shivah. Undaunted by the unspeakable bloodbath that had taken place within their daled amos, members of Jersey City’s Jewish community stood strong, refusing to abandon ship and return to Brooklyn or Monsey or Monroe and brainstorming instead how they could rebuild Ferencz’s business for him.


Help All Around

Yerachmiel Fried of Supermarket Maven in Monsey was tapped to head the team, and while he wouldn’t make a penny on the job, he was more than ready to roll up his sleeves for Ferencz and his family. The night after the shivah ended, Fried called Ferencz to let him know that plans were in place to build a new kosher grocery at the 2,000-square foot space where Ferencz had recently put down a deposit in order to accommodate the growth of the town’s heimishe community. As the freshly widowed father of three began coping with his new reality, Fried told him repeatedly not to worry about the store, saying that everything was falling into place at the site which had once housed a church and was located just two blocks from the original market, its storefront now covered with sheets of plywood and a mural of a blue heart and flowers.

“I went down and started taking measurements and making layouts,” says Fried. “I went to the old store to see what I could salvage, but to be honest, it didn’t look like anything could be saved. As I walked through the mess with boxes underfoot, I picked up an avocado and there was a bullet hole through the pit. When I saw that I dropped it and ran out. I never went back in there again.”

Reaching out to vendors to create the new store, Fried received responses that far exceeded his expectations, with people eager to jump in and do anything they could to lighten Ferencz’s load. ABCO Refrigeration, All Styles Stone & Marble, Bluepro Layouts, Consumer Lighting, Crosstown Glass, Exhibit A Millwork Design & Installation, Ike Electric, Noam Mechanical, Resnick Refrigeration, electrician David Gottlieb, and heating and cooling specialist Shloimy Jacobowitz donated goods and services for free. Culinary Depot, Lions HVAC, Rosenberg Construction, M. Fried Store Fixtures, and OpenTeq Low Voltage billed their products and labor below cost prices.

The Herzog family and Gefen foods were another important part of the equation, contributing not only groceries but also brainstorming names and creating logos. Simultaneously conveying the concepts of food, peaceful coexistence, and surviving a storm of epic proportions, the name Olive Branch encompassed the full scope of the project. As the new kosher store began taking shape, the typical delays for approvals and permits never materialized, even when drastic changes needed to be made to the stone façade of the three-story building.

“I drew a sketch of what we needed and it was approved the next day, even without a regular plan,” Fried relates. “The mayor and the building department were both very helpful and we got our permits in a day. So many people were working along with me asking me what else I needed.”

The three sponsoring supermarkets graciously provided everything necessary to complete the job in record time. When Fried realized that Olive Branch needed shopping carts, Evergreen came through, loading them up onto a pickup truck for the 33-mile trek from Monsey to Jersey City. On days when Fried would arrive at Olive Branch driving his son’s pickup, members of Jersey City’s chassidic community and their non-Jewish neighbors volunteer to lend a hand and unload boxes of supplies.

Ferencz remembers that when he first heard of the plans to rebuild his store, he was too overwhelmed by his new reality to process the information, but Fried’s constant reassurances helped him tap into his innate positive attitude, something he considers to be a gift from the Ribbono Shel Olam.


New Realities

After two-and-a-half months of relying on deliveries from Monroe’s Peppermint Supermarket, which had stepped in to fill the void, Jersey City’s kehillah was grateful for the opportunity to patronize the Olive Branch and support Ferencz and his family. Still, Moishe Dovid had mixed feelings when he actually opened Olive Branch’s doors on Rosh Chodesh Adar.

“People ask me how I’m able to handle things, but I do it because I have to move on with life and that was the best thing to do — to just walk in and start again,” says Ferencz.

He displayed his strong faith even at the shivah, offering chizuk to those who came to comfort him and counseling visitors to trust in the Ribbono Shel Olam.

“Does anybody know how I feel? No,” Moishe Dovid told a group of university students who had come to the shivah house in solidarity with him and the community. “The only thing I can say is that you have to live with the Ribbono Shel Olam, no matter if you’re doing good or you’re doing bad. When you’re doing good you know how you are. And when you’re doing bad, you say, ‘Ribbono Shel Olam, you know I want to be good.’ If you live with that, you can push yourself through a lot of hardships.”

Ferencz described his wife as the life force that sustained the local community, telling neighbors that with Mindy Hashem yikom damah gone, it was as if they were all taken off life support and needed to learn to breathe on their own. He counseled those who came to be menachem aveil to appreciate their wives and hold them in high esteem.

“Hashem created a husband and wife with different natures,” advised Ferencz at the shivah. “Respect that, no matter what happens. Don’t wait for a tragedy for you to miss her.”

Among the many who came to console the grieving family was Mishpacha’s Yochonon Donn, who was inspired by Ferencz’s staunch emunah.

“Hashem should help me continue providing the chizuk that people need,” Ferencz told Donn. “People come here to strengthen me so I’m just passing it along to the next person.”

Having promised his three young children at his wife’s funeral that he would be both mother and father to them, Ferencz began settling into a new routine. But when coronavirus struck, it was clear that there were more changes ahead. With schools shut down, Ferencz found himself in a tight spot — although his store, an essential business, was allowed to remain open, someone had to be home with his children.

“I couldn’t send my kids to a neighbor because COVID was going around, so I called up my sister and we made plans to go up to Kiryas Joel,” says Moishe Dovid. “At the beginning we thought it would be maybe two or three weeks and that everything would be back to normal, but that wasn’t the way it turned out.”

Ferencz and his children are currently living in Kiryas Joel with his parents, and after seeing his five-year-old off to school, he makes the drive down to Jersey City a little over an hour away. He has one employee opening up in the morning, another running the cash register, and a third stocking shelves. A man of few words who was unwittingly thrust into spotlight, Ferencz says he’s overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and the many malachim who got him back on his feet.

“I have unlimited hakaras hatov,” says Ferencz, who is still learning of more people who were involved in building his store for him, even months later. “I became famous in a way that nobody ever wants, but I just want to get back to my life and move on. One thing I can say is that every working mother who brings parnassah in shtib is doing unbelievable work — I know because now I’m one of them.”


Accounts Receivable

All told, launching Olive Branch was a $400,000 project, and Evergreen, Seasons, and Gourmet Glatt all shouldered the cost, jumping at the chance to take away at least one source of pain from a grieving family, while also serving a Jewish community that had lost its main source of mehadrin food.

“This is why Hashem put us here — He gives us opportunities and you have to grab them,” says Gourmet Glatt’s Yoeli Steinberg. “This is the way of a Yid. When your brother is in trouble and you have what he needs, you have to step up so he can get back on.”

“While in our day-to-day lives our main focus is serving our customers, there is no doubt that underneath it all there is a greater purpose to what we do,” adds Seasons’ Morty Bistritzky. “We’re here to give back to the community, and in the face of unfathomable tragedy that struck very close to home, there was never a doubt in our minds that we would do whatever it takes to be there for them every step of the way.”

The idea that getting Olive Branch up and running could be considered helping a competitor never once factored into the equation for any of the three kosher supermarket giants who worked in unison to help a man none of them had ever met before.

“In the non-Jewish supermarket world, they say that the customer is king, but we know that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is King,” says Kauftheil. “After 120, when you come up to Shamayim and they ask what you did, no one will care that you had a supermarket, and the fact that you gave out a few discount cards isn’t going to matter. But the idea that you have real maasim tovim, that you rolled up your sleeves and did what you could, will have far greater impact in the Beis Din shel Maalah.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 838)

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