43
Kravitz celebrates its founder with deals, specials
Kravitz Delicatessen celebrates founder with deals, specials
By Kalea Hall
LIBERTY
The late Rose Kravitz’s presence still can be felt in the deli she founded 77 years ago.
On this manic Monday morning, she would have been conversing with customers, cutting up some corned beef and creating an inviting energy for her customers at Kravitz Deli.
“They had no money,” said Jack Kravitz of his parents, Rose and Herbert. “They didn’t have a choice. They had to succeed.”
And succeed they did, because the business still stands.
In celebration of what would have been Rose’s 100th birthday Friday, and a Jewish Food Fest, Kravitz Deli will have specials and some of Rose’s recipes on the menu at each location: 3135 Belmont Ave. and 311 S. Main St. in the Poland Library.
The items include Rose’s special hand-boiled traditional bagels made with eggs and oil, chicken mish mosh soup with noodles, farfel and matzoh ball and specials on corned beef and kipfels.
Rose started her Elm Street Delicatessen because she needed to provide for her family. It wasn’t a choice. It was a must.
It didn’t matter that she was a woman going into business at age 23. She needed to care for her husband, Herbert, who often was ill.
She gained experience with food and business when she worked for the fancy-food section of McKelvey’s Department Store in downtown Youngstown.
“To go into business as a woman was a very unusual thing,” Jack said.
Kravitz will sponsor 10 female entrepreneurs through the Youngstown Business Incubator’s Women in Entrepreneurship program in honor of Rose’s drive to become an entrepreneur.
Rose, who emigrated at age 8 from a part of Austria-Hungary that is now Croatia, started the Jewish deli for everyone in the community to embrace.
They did.
“There weren’t grocery stores,” Jack Kravitz said. “They didn’t have mega stores. She catered to the whole community. Her vision was that we were a deli for everyone.”
Her specialty was corned beef.
“She always made sure she used the best corned beef she could get,” he said.
Jack and his siblings grew up with deli as their fourth sibling. In 1947, the deli moved to a new place on Elm Street with an apartment above the deli for the family to live.
“For me, it was a normal way of life,” said Donia Kravitz Foster, Herb and Rose’s daughter.
“We would be upstairs and called downstairs to help before we would be able to get our makeup on.”
It was an exciting, fun atmosphere to grow up in and provided the Kravitz children with a unique place to make memories.
By 1950, the deli added a bakery, and Rose developed her special bagel recipe and her signature kipfel pastry.
“We all worked from a young age,” Foster said.
She still remembers her mother bending down, scooping her up and putting her on the bakery table.
“I took my naps under the counter,” Foster said.
By 1970, the neighborhood had changed, and it was time for a new location. The Kravitz Deli took over what had been an Isaly’s on Belmont Avenue in Liberty.
There are still some pieces of Isaly’s in the deli such as the stools that surround the coffee counter.
“There are some signature items in here we don’t want to change,” Jack said.
On the walls of the Belmont Avenue deli are pictures of Rose, her honorary diploma from Youngstown State University and clips from local and national media publications highlighting the business.
Looking back on it now, Foster realizes how much her mother had to go through to become an entrepreneur.
“You didn’t get the full impact until you were an adult yourself,” she said.
Rose’s hard-working attitude never left her. She worked at the deli until six weeks before her death at 95 on Aug. 25, 2011.
“Every day she would come in and talk to everyone,” Jack said. “She would come and sample the soups. She was our quality-control person.”
There were some rough years for the deli and bakery from the shutdown of the steel mills to the loss of a wholesale bagel company.
But there were a lot of good times. When rumors spread about the business hitting a rough patch in the 1950s, Rose and Herb quashed them by going out to buy a new Pontiac and parking it in front of the deli.
Jack came back to the business in 1987 and explored the wholesale bagel industry. That part of the business helped sustain it for 15 years until the loss of a major customer led to its shutdown 10 years ago.
Five years ago, Kravitz opened a second location inside the Poland Library. The newest part of the business is the Inspired Catering offering.
Rose “was not into catering,” Jack said. “She was the retail person. She liked the one-on-one, personal experience with the customers.”
Foster knows her mother would be excited to see the business today.
“As we grew older, we started to think of the deli as the same as any member of the family,” Foster said. “It was a way of life for all us.
“We are deli people. No matter what we do, we are deli people.”