Not business as usual for Jewish merchants | Opinion
“It’s my life. It’s what I do,” said Lana Abraham, of Coral Springs.
This year marks two decades for Abraham and her husband, Boris, as owners of Plus Platinum Jewelry Inc. in Festival Marketplace in Pompano Beach, but these days they’re not much in the mood for celebrating the occasion.
Like millions of other business owners across the globe, the Abrahams are victims of the economic fallout brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our business is our life. We hope things will get better soon,” she said.
Abraham is a proud Russian Jew who has lived through uncertainty in the past.
In 1995, she left her native Uzbekistan, a former Soviet nation, in the hopes of making a better life for herself and her family in America.
From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, emigration from Uzbekistan intensified with 90% of the country’s Jewish population resettling in Israel, the U.S. and other parts of the world.
“The opportunity to run a business was non-existent back home,” Abraham said.
Like the majority of the retail world, Festival Marketplace was shuttered for more than two months, and revenue for the business owners there is currently at 50% or less.
Before my recent visit to the popular shopping mecca, the parking lot was always full of customers’ cars, and you had to wait in line to place an order at the food court. Not now!
Amiss is the older clientele (of which at least half are Jewish) that often frequent the mall. No doubt fear of potentially contracting the virus is keeping them away.
Once again our livelihood is being put to the test, but history has shown that Jewish people are resilient survivors, and will find a way to overcome these challenging times.
“It’s not like it was before, but step-by-step we hope business is coming back,” Abraham said.
“We hope America will be great again.”
As I said goodbye, her gesture of knocking on the wooden counter left us both optimistic that our world will be successful once again.
Email your thoughts to Editor Alan Goch at algoch@sunsentinel.com.
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