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This Upper West Side appetizing shop stands apart by standing still
(New York Jewish Week) — Paul Klausner, a native Upper West Sider, has clear memories of shopping with his mother as a young boy at Murray’s Sturgeon Shop, a store on Broadway and 89th Street known for smoked fish. In Klausner’s family, when it came to buying lox and all the fixings, Murray’s was the place.
Now, some 60 years later, Klausner is still a devoted fan. Although he no longer lives in Manhattan, his beloved Murray’s remains very much the same as the Murray’s of his childhood — in fact, little has changed there since it first opened in 1946. As for Klausner, he and his wife, April Stewart Klausner, keep their freezer in Litchfield County, Connecticut, stocked with Murray’s sliced center-cut nova, which they pick up whenever they are in the city.
In the changing retail world now dominated by chain stores and online shopping, Murray’s is a unicorn. Even among other renowned, longstanding New York appetizing stores like Barney Greengrass, Zabar’s and Russ & Daughters, Murray’s stands apart by standing still. Except for one short move in the 1940s — half a block uptown to its present location — it has always occupied the same tiny piece of real estate. Throughout its 77 years of existence, Murray’s has never expanded its brick and mortar store, nor have its owners opened an adjacent restaurant or cafe. It is a small, narrow slip of a shop, more similar in size to a subway car than a food emporium.
“We are one of the oldest continually running stores on Broadway,” said 65-year-old Ira Goller, the third owner of the shop. “There is nothing else like this anywhere.”
Numerous aspects make Murray’s stand out — the lack of in-store seating, for one, as well as the care in which every customer’s order is hand-filled. Varieties of smoked fish are sliced with surgeon-like precision — so finely that each piece is practically transparent — and, perhaps most notably, said fish is wrapped, origami-like, in heavy white waxed paper, never plastic. Wax paper “absorbs any oils and grease,” said Goller. “If you put the appetizing in a little plastic bag, it is not fresh in a day or two.”
At Murray’s, the smoked fish is still sliced by hand and wrapped in wax paper. (Talia Siegel)
Stewart Klausner describes the shop as “stepping into a time machine where there’s a real connection between merchant and customer.” The countermen, who greet each customer warmly, have all been at Murray’s for at least 10 years. Ecuador-born, Yiddish-speaking Oscar Leon, whom Goller considers his right-hand man, is now in his 45th year. “It’s a family here,” Leon told the New York Jewish Week.
Even the decor is nearly the same as it always was: stainless-steel refrigerators and counters, mirrored side wall, tilework from the 1940s. Of course, over the years, there’s been some nods to modernity: A clock that hangs on the back wall was installed in the 1960s, and somewhere along the way, air conditioning was installed. These days, Murray’s has an online presence — and the store takes many phone orders, especially since the pandemic — but about half of its business is from people who walk in, Goller said.
One regular customer is 54-year old baker Jen Daniels. “Despite the fact that it is actually kind of old, it is immaculate,” Daniels told the New York Jewish Week. “You could eat off the floor there, it is so clean.”
Goller, who previously worked as a Wall Street commodities analyst, bought the store in 1990 from Artie Cutler, founder and owner of several popular Upper West Side eateries, including Artie’s Deli, Ollie’s Noodle Shop and Carmine’s Italian Restaurant. Cutler took over Murray’s in 1974 from the original owners and founders, brothers Sam and Murray Bernstein.
In passing the torch, Cutler stipulated that Goller would find a partner with experience in the food business. There was also an understanding that nothing would be changed in the first year.
After that 12-month learning period, Goller untethered himself from his partner and got to work making a few — just a few! — changes, with an eye on the bottom line. “I had notes to pay, mortgages to pay, mouths to feed,” Goller recalled. No longer would the store be closed on Mondays, as were so many of the stores on Broadway in the 1980s, when Monday was considered the slowest day of the week. Going forward, Murray’s would be open 363 days a year — the store closes only on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur.
Although previous owners shut the store during the eight days of Passover, Goller decided to keep it open, and even to sell bagels over the holiday, during which the consumption of bread is forbidden. Goller said he knew he made the right decision when a longstanding customer came in during Passover, wagged his finger at him for selling bagels — and then purchased a dozen.
All of the fish is smoked according to Goller’s specifications in a local smokehouse; the soups and salads are made in house. The food emerges from the tiny kitchen at the rear of the long, narrow shop. It’s not much to speak of: There’s a walk-in refrigerator — for storing pickles; matjes, schmaltz and pickled herring, coleslaw and smoked fish — and a 36-inch electric Garland oven with four burners, used for making soups made from recipes passed on to Goller by his mother-in-law. The crumb cake, baked apples and dairy noodle pudding are baked in that single oven. You won’t even find a dishwasher — everything is hand washed.
While waiting for their orders, customers might overhear the sound of music — what’s perceived as a steady beat is actually the sound of onions being hand-chopped. What you won’t hear is the sound of a food processor: When making whitefish salad, the cooks use tweezers to pluck out the bones from the smoked fish, then crush it by (gloved) hands so that chunks of fish remain in the finished product.
All the salads at Murray’s are made in-house. (Talia Siegel)
Perhaps the biggest change Goller made was in 1995, when he decided to add sliced deli meats to Murray’s menu. “You would have thought I shot the pope,” he joked. “It was the first thing I did that caused an uproar.” The kerfuffle eventually died down, and now, alongside creamed herring, lox and Waldorf salad, items like sliced roast beef and turkey breast are available. All of the meat is kosher and sliced on a dedicated meat slicer so that, in deference to the laws of kosher food, there is no mixing of meat and dairy. (There is no ritual oversight in the store other than Goller, who takes the kashrut of the place seriously.)
But you don’t have to keep kosher — or even be Jewish — to love Murray’s. ”When I first came here, 95% of the customers were Jewish,” Goller told the New York Jewish Week. “Now it’s probably 70%.”
He credits Russ & Daughters, in part, for this expansion of Ashkenazi appetizing foods into the general, and younger, population. “Russ & Daughters has introduced people to bagels, lox and cream cheese,” he said. “Exposure of this type is good for everybody.”
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The post This Upper West Side appetizing shop stands apart by standing still appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Memoir of child of Holocaust survivors takes riveting twists
Book Review by Julie Kirsh (former Sun Media News Research Director)
Exclusive to The Jewish Post
“We used to Dream of Freedom, A Memoir of Family, the Holocaust, and the Stories We Don’t Tell”
By Sam Chaiton (Dundurn Press) 2024
Sam Chaiton’s memoir of growing up with Holocaust survivor parents in downtown Toronto in the 1950s is a compelling read.
Jeanne Beker, a well known Toronto fashion writer, mentions in her praise for “We used to Dream of Freedom” that her survivor parents talked incessantly about their war experiences.
My own parents, both survivors, would drop tidbits of their stories now and again. I learned to be watchful and vigilant for these rare moments of revelation. However, questioning my parents about the Holocaust, would cause them pain. I knew when to stand down.
In his memoir, Sam Chaiton tells the reader that his parents chose to remain completely silent about their wartime experiences. Poignantly their son was left with a silence that he interpreted as huge empty sound. Although the son could understand some Yiddish, his parents turned to Polish in order to keep the “kinder safe”. Outright denial of illness and death was part of his parents’ way of coping.
Born in the 1950s on Palmerston Boulevard in downtown Toronto, Chaiton paints a vivid picture of his youth as the middle son of five boys. He describes the mayhem of a household of barked orders and punishment by his father’s belt. His mother, as with many other survivors, was obsessed with eating and food. Chaiton learned early that rejecting his controlling mother’s food was one of his few weapons. “It’s hard not to do what a Holocaust survivor wants you to”, he says. Chaiton had to stare down two parents both with tattoos.
Dance proved to be a saving grace for Chaiton. On the dance floor, with a partner, the gates of happiness and permission to be oneself, opened. The Toronto Dance Theatre in Yorkville was a salvation and home for Chaiton. Also important to Chaiton was a family – not his troubled blood family but a chosen one – a commune.
In 1973, after a sojourn in New York, Chaiton decided that he was not a performance dancer. Back in Toronto as he pointedly danced with his mother at his brother’s wedding, she told him that he was her favourite child, imposing “the psychological damage that parental favouritism caused”.
Living in a commune with a chosen family afforded Chaiton the freedom to dig deep into his psyche, face his traumatic upbringing and tear down the rigid rules of society and the biological family. At a certain point, for reasons he explains in the book, Chaiton made the decision to vanish from the lives of his parents and brothers.
In 1980 the commune took up the cause of the injustice and illegal jailing of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Carter had been exonerated, released from prison and then reconvicted and sent back to prison.
In hindsight Chaiton wonders if his disengagement from his family caused them the same wounds and feelings of emptiness that Carter had to face when he was reincarcerated.
In 1985 while sitting in a New Jersey prison yard with friends and Carter, Chaiton had the riveting vision that he was in a concentration camp, “on a mission to liberate (his) parents – the dream of every Holocaust survivor’s child.”
In the summer of 1985, Chaiton received the news from Toronto that his parents were involved in a fatal car accident. Only after his mother’s death, was Chaiton able to acknowledge that in spite of her smothering, she gave him a sense of self worth and strength.
In 1988 Chaiton co-wrote the story of freeing Carter. One of his brothers saw him on a news broadcast, contacted him and the 20-year silence between Chaiton and his blood family was over.
Riding on the coattails of the successful release of Carter, Chaiton and some friends established an organization that continues to exist today. Innocence Canada has helped wrongfully convicted people like Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Steven Truscott.
In chapter 16, entitled Wierzbnik, Chaiton finally learns about his father’s testimony published in a book, “Remembering Survival”, by a university professor. Reading about his father’s history helped Chaiton to understand the damage done to survivors, his parents’ trauma and why the home that they created for their sons after the war was so fraught.
Chaiton remarks on the interconnectedness of learning about the sufferings of his parents, his own personal struggles and the gift his father left him of being able to tell his own story.
Sam Chaiton’s profound memoir took courage and brutal honesty to write.
His book teaches that the legacy left by Holocaust survivors, along with a deep sadness, is the innate need of the children to persevere and find their own path of survival and growth.
Obituaries
CAROL SLATER (née GENSER)
With great courage on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, surrounded by her family.
Treasured daughter of the late Esther and the late Percy. Beloved wife of Ron for 69 years. Loving mother and mother-in-law of Charles and Dina Slater, Erin and Joe Battat, Adam and Kit, Claudia and the late David. Cherished grandmother of Zach, Robert and Hydi, Ben and Martha, Liam and Addison, Thom and Emeline, Max, Ilai, Emanuelle and Eli. Proud great-grandmother of Rafael, Lily, Maya, and Jojo. Special sister and sister-in-law of David and Joan Genser, Roberta and Mayer Lawee; and sister-in-law of Joel and Sheila Slater. Greatly missed by her nieces, nephews, family, friends and by all who knew her.
The family would like to thank Drs. Shamy, Lipes, Chang, the doctors, nurses and staff at the Jewish General Hospital Palliative Care Unit as well as DeyDey, Linette and everyone who took such wonderful care of our Mom.
Funeral service from Paperman & Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W., on Sunday, November 10 at 9:30 a.m. Livestream available. Burial in Israel.
Donations in her memory may be made to the “Carol and Ron Scholarship” c/o Mothers Matter Canada 1-604-676-8250
Publish Date: Nov 9, 2024
CAROL SLATER
(née GENSER)
With great courage on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, surrounded by her family.
Treasured daughter of the late Esther and the late Percy. Beloved wife of Ron for 69 years. Loving mother and mother-in-law of Charles and Dina Slater, Erin and Joe Battat, Adam and Kitt, Claudia and the late David. Cherished grandmother of Zach, Robert and Hydi, Ben and Martha, Liam and Addison. Proud great-grandmother of Rafael, Lily, Maya, and Jojo. Special sister and sister-in-law of David and Joan Genser, Roberta and Mayer Lawee; and sister-in-law of Joel and Sheila Slater. Greatly missed by her nieces, nephews, family, friends and by all who knew her.
The family would like to thank Drs. Shamy, Lipes, Chang, the doctors, nurses and staff at the Jewish General Hospital Palliative Care Unit as well as DeyDey, Linette and everyone who took such wonderful care of our Mom.
Funeral service from Paperman & Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W., on Sunday, November 10 at 9:30 a.m. Live stream available. Burial in Israel.
Donations in her memory may be made to the “Carol and Ron Scholarship” c/o Mothers Matter Canada 1-604-676-8250
Features
How to Implement a Successful Casino Marketing Strategy
Your casino stands out in your market and attracts interest. But does your audience know that? With effective marketing, you can transform your casino from an average competitor into a top industry player. We will show you proven strategies to boost your business now and in the future. And when you have proven strategies like insights from a High Roller online casinos review in Canada, the possibilities are endless.
1. Improve Visibility
With stiff competition among casinos, being easily found online is crucial. Discoverability measures how simple it is for people to find your casino.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of your guests looking for a casino. How easy is it to find yours? Try searching on different engines, checking reviews on travel sites, and looking for your casino on social media. See how often your casino appears and how well it ranks. Use tools like Moz and SEMrush to get a clear picture of your current visibility.
To increase your casino’s online visibility, there are a number of strategies you can try. First, try to create distinct landing pages for each key amenity at your casino. Incorporate relevant keywords, high-quality images, and engaging headlines.
You can also use search engine ads carefully. Follow Google’s guidelines by targeting approved countries. These include responsible gambling information on your landing pages and avoiding targeting minors. Check local regulations and test ads with relevant keywords.
Don’t forget to set up social media profiles on platforms your audience frequents. Engage in discussions about gaming, your casino, local news, and community events.
Optimize your content with keywords about your amenities, location, unique features, and events. Highlight what sets you apart so visitors can easily find you.
Use beacons or proximity marketing to attract nearby guests, especially when competing with other casinos. This helps target customers in the real world, not just online.
Form partnerships with local businesses, entertainers, event suppliers, and food vendors to boost your visibility and word of mouth.
2. Focus on Events and Group Business
Your casino offers more than gaming. You might have a luxury hotel, advanced technology, event spaces, a spa, and great restaurants. So, think about the whole picture in your marketing.
Casinos are great for big events like weddings, conferences, and reunions. Make sure your marketing targets these opportunities to attract them.
3. Identify the Jobs to Be Done
Marketers used to rely mainly on demographics, like age, income, and education, to predict behavior. Understanding audience behavior based on demographics is useful. For example, Anderson Digital notes that Boomers and Gen Xers spend 80% of their casino money on gaming and 20% on food and entertainment. In contrast, Millennials spend 30% on gaming and 70% on food, entertainment, and other services. To attract Millennial and Gen Z customers, focus on better entertainment, food options, online game components, and mobile marketing.
However, demographics alone don’t tell the whole story. For instance, knowing a group of women outside your casino are in their late 20s, college-educated, and have high-paying jobs is helpful. But, it doesn’t reveal their reasons for being there.
These women might be on a business trip with some free time, in town for a family reunion, or celebrating a bachelorette party. With just their demographic info, it’s hard to know their motivations, challenges, or needs.
This framework helps marketers understand why customers choose their products or services. Women at a casino for a bachelorette party are looking for a fun atmosphere with entertainment, food, and drinks. But if they’re there for work, they need a stress-free environment with good Wi-Fi, charging stations, and quiet spaces for meetings.
Understand what your audience wants and how they see your role. This helps you tailor your messaging, marketing, and offerings.
4. Create Positive Feedback Loops
Casinos attract customers with fun experiences like gaming, dining, and entertainment. By enhancing these positive feelings, you can boost your casino’s marketing success and encourage repeat visits.
Feedback loops happen when the result of an action is used to influence the action itself. For example, if a child makes a parent laugh, they’re likely to repeat the funny behavior to get more laughter.
Positive feedback loops make it more likely that the action will be repeated. Negative feedback loops make it less likely. You likely use positive feedback loops in your casino already. Guests who win are happy and want to play again. Those who have a bad experience are less likely to return.
You can enhance marketing by using feedback loops. After a positive experience, like winning or a great meal, encourage guests to refer others or leave reviews. If a guest uses a discount, offer another deal immediately. If your casino has a hotel, send emails encouraging future bookings right after positive experiences, like upgrades or enjoyable events.
Reply to positive feedback and reviews with invitations for future experiences. Make sure to also reward loyal customers with special offers and exclusive perks. Don’t forget to address negative feedback by turning it into a positive experience.
5. Use Social Proof
People usually trust each other more than they trust your brand. They’re more likely to listen to recommendations from friends or online reviews than your own claims.
To build trust, you need endorsements from others. Social proof means people tend to follow the actions of those they admire.
Show positive reviews on your website and social media. Record video testimonials from satisfied guests and winners. Encourage guests to share their experiences online and tag your casino. Keep an eye on reviews and respond to feedback. Set up a photo booth in the casino for guests to take winning photos. Display pictures and videos of recent winners on screens around the casino. Think about your audience’s motivations and where they get their information to find creative ways to use social proof.
6. Keep Up With Gaming Trends
Casinos are changing quickly. Online gaming, e-sports, and new tech like virtual and augmented reality are key. To stay competitive, casinos need to understand and use these trends.
As you create your casino marketing strategy, consider these key trends. E-sports are growing fast, so partnering with teams can help you reach new audiences. Virtual and AR are changing how guests experience gaming, making it more engaging from anywhere. Online casinos are becoming more popular with relaxed regulations. So, keep up with industry changes to stay competitive. Finally, as gaming tastes shift, staying updated on new trends will keep you ahead.
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