Washington Jewish Week  - 12.30.2004

Washington Jewish Week

Creating a Jewish retail mecca

Real estate developer brings Jewish businesses together  

by Helen Mintz Belitsky 

Special to WJW 

Greater Washington's Jewish community is known more for its dispersed centers of Jewish activity than for a lively nexus. 

But due to the incremental efforts of real estate developer and native son Allen Kronstadt, president of A.R. Kronstadt Realty Investors in Rockville, the Randolph Hills Shopping Center on Rockville's Boiling Brook Parkway is becoming a one-stop Jewish center for kosher lunches and dinners, bargain shopping, Jewish gifts and soon-to-be opened bagel and pizza shops. 

Just behind the center is the Board of Jewish Education and its library, and across the street is the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. Due east and west of the center lie the thriving Jewish neighborhoods of Silver Spring's Kemp Mill and Woodside, Potomac and Rockville. 

Those who don't recognize the location will likely recognize the names of the center's stores: Royal Dragon kosher Chinese restaurant, KosherMart -- which earlier this year replaced the well-known Katz's Supermarket, which had replaced the old A&P -- Israeli Accents, and the soon-to-be-added Goldberg's Bagels of Baltimore and a kosher pizza parlor. 

"For 15 years," Kronstadt, 52, said, "I had a vision of creating a center for the Jewish community." 

With Katz's Supermarket as an anchor, he saw Randolph Hills as a natural center for several Orthodox communities. 

In addition to making good business sense, Kronstadt says he always worked a little bit harder as a developer in that location to bring in businesses that served the Jewish community. 

He also had an emotional investment in the location. His grandfather, Morris Perlmutter, born in the small Russian town of Roshishch, now in Ukraine, was a home builder, sharing a business with his children. 

Perlmutter developed the center in the early 1960s, as well as the some 1,000 single-family homes around it a few years later. 

In separate negotiations and little by little, Kronstadt realized his dream. When the Board of Jewish Education lost its former lease, he worked with the agency to find a home behind the center. 

When the Katz family decided to sell the business, he helped negotiate a new 20-year lease with KosherMart at the same location. He helped Leslie Kanner parlay her small warehouse Israel gift importing business into the center's retail store, Israeli Accents. 

A North Bethesda resident, Kronstadt grew up in Northwest D.C. off Grubb Road, where he and his family were members of Ohr Kodesh Congregation, and where he attended Hebrew school and became a bar mitzvah. 

He labored from the ground up in the real estate business, beginning in high school in the '60s and '70s as a construction worker on warehouses behind the Randolph Hills Shopping Center. 

After attending Babson College near Boston, and the University of Denver, he went into real estate as a commercial leasing agent in 1974, set up his own property management company in 1978 and took over all of the family property on a contract basis. 

In 1986, he and Sy Zuckerman formed the property management and brokerage firm Zuckerman Kronstadt. The two had met in the early 1980s when Kronstadt chaired the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington's real estate committee that Zuckerman served on. 

At the time, through a private syndication, Kronstadt took control as general managing partner of the half-million-square-foot complex, which included the warehouses. 

The enterprising businessman is also indefatigable on the dance floor. Asked about his hobbies, he names his children first, Michael, 16, Jamie, 14, and Danielle, 4, dancing second -- West Coast Swing, Hustle and Latin -- and traveling, third, which included climbing the Andes. 

His Jewish identity and sense of Jewish history were strengthened as a result of being chosen for a formal training program organized by B'nai B'rith for high school seniors enrolled in colleges around the country. 

The program offered in-depth education on contemporary Jewish history as a counter-offensive to growing Arab propaganda on campus. 

Philanthropy is a driving force in Kronstadt's life, and over the years he has met many of his closest friends and business associates locally, nationally and internationally through his involvement in ORT and other Jewish organizations. 

"As a businessman," he says, "I have a tremendous respect for return on investment." 

His global philanthropic work is fueled by this principle. Leadership positions in ORT, the Israel Policy Forum and the National Conference of Soviet Jewry have taken Kronstadt around the world, from Jerusalem to Berlin to Moscow. 

Explaining his dedication to ORT, where he held positions in American ORT ranging from D. C. chapter president to board member to executive committee member and officer, he points to the tremendous yields on an investment in this organization. 

"ORT focuses on career training, which in turn allows people to make a living," he explains. "In Israel, ORT is significantly entwined with the country's educational programs. The striking thing about ORT is that 50 percent of their world budget of approximately $300 million is spent in Israel." 

As American ORT's representative board member to the NCSJ, formerly the National Council on Soviet Jewry, Kronstadt traveled to Moscow last spring for meetings with the ambassadors of the United States and Israel. 

"Today," he says, explaining his mission, "NCSJ is the representative for 49 different organizations, which have provided services there, and over 300 local federations, community councils and committees across the U.S. who have an interest in the former Soviet Union. Discussions centered on the rapidly changing concept of democracy in the last 12 months in Russia. 

"The free press and political opposition have pretty much been dismantled," he explains. "The Jewish community doesn't face anti-Semitism from the government and is thriving now. But it may be more important now than ever to monitor what's going on for half a million Jews who still live there. No one knows what's going to happen," he concludes. 

As evidence of the dramatic changes history has wrought, Kronstadt describes his experiences in Berlin last April, where he served as an observer with the NCSJ at the Organization for Security and Cooperation Conference on Anti-Semitism. 

"I had to walk from my hotel to the foreign ministry building," he says, "one of 1,000 participants from around the world. [As a Jew], my path took me safely along a security wall made of up legions of German soldiers, armored cars and sniffing dogs." 

The conference was a follow-up to the Vienna conference, the first international meeting devoted to the topic of anti-Semitism. The 55 participating nations recognized anti-Semitism as a human rights issue and agreed to work together to fight it. 

A key to Kronstadt's understanding of his role on the Jewish world scene lies in the message his grandfather left him. 

"My grandfather was a Zionist," says Kronstadt, "a supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. He taught me that history is not only what you inherit, it's what you help to create."