Satmar do business with a purpose at NJ expo

The sages informed King David early one morning that the Jewish people required financial assistance. “Let them go and support one another,” the biblical king told them, as the Talmud states in Berachot 3b.

That remark — Ze mizeh in Hebrew — is the inspiration behind the second annual Zeh Mizeh Satmar Business Expo. Thousands of all ages, mostly men, flocked to the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center in Edison on July 12 to interact with 350 businesses exhibiting their products.

Joel Braver, real estate developer and organizer of the expo, told JNS that the Satmar Chassidic community has many young entrepreneurs. The expo is designed to help them interact with hundreds or even thousands of people in a single day, rather than running around networking all year.

“They’re trying to help each other,” he said of the expo.

A unique challenge in the Satmar community is its breadth, according to Braver. “You sometimes don’t even know what your family members do,” he told JNS.

At the expo, Satmar-led businesses hawked everything from insurance, mobile car washes, logistics and luxury travel to warehousing and real estate. Even King David would have been hard-pressed to imagine the technologies that would emerge from this particular community, which is not given credit widely for its technological prowess.

Sol Schiff, the CEO of Systech, told JNS that the Brooklyn-based, cybersecurity firm that he founded in 2014 has clients in more than 30 states and overseas. He first took on a partner in 2018.

“Since then, our company tripled in 2019, tripled in 2020, tripled in 2021,” he told JNS. “We doubled last year, and we’re looking forward to doubling again this year, with God’s help.”

Systech focuses on companies in the compliance space, including those that address the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and New York’s Department of Financial Services.

“We manage everything from start to finish,” Schiff said. “We take care of all IT needs, should it be procurement, help desk support and cybersecurity audits.”

Shloime Breuer is CEO of the website development and management company MB Tech Design. The company produces websites for e-commerce, estate agents and developers, among others.

Breuer learned his trade in Israel, where he used to live. His business, now a decade old, has seven employees and about 500 clients, he told JNS. Asked if there were special challenges to being a Satmar business owner, Breuer said he loves working with everyone.

Avrumi Kolman, a software developer with Goflow, a multi-channel software product that manages order and inventory for those who sell things on Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other marketplaces, was working the floor. As was Baruch Schwartz, a salesman for the payroll tracking company Friday, a year-and-a-half-old business employs about 10.

Shpeel Entertainment may have had the expo’s flashiest exhibits. The company rents out virtual-reality rides and games for special events.

As Samuel Kalman, Shpeel’s managing partner, spoke with JNS, a co-worker of his wearing VR glasses rode on a device shaped like a surfboard. A screen behind him showed a mirror image of what he was seeing — a winding, dipping and diving trip on a roller coaster.

Not everything was so flashy. The expo featured businesses involved in warehousing, a mobile car wash, decking and graphics.

Equire, a loans and cash-flow company, featured dozens of dollar bills hanging from a tree at its booth. World Wide Plumbing Supply displayed an in-wall toilet system.

At the expo, some signage and conversation was in English; others were in Yiddish. And while business is business, many at the event said that Satmar businesses operate with an added purpose.

“If you don’t care about people and you’re just here to make money, you’re not going to make as much as when you’re really caring and you’re doing what’s right,” Mayer Kramarkshy, sales manager at MassMutual Financial Group, told JNS. 

“If you have the right mindset — if you’re driven and you do what’s right — you’ll be successful,” he added.

Schiff, of Systech, told JNS that every growing company faces challenges. But, he said, “as long as you have a good vision and a good mission, which should be about focusing on helping people, it doesn’t matter what position your company is in.”

For some of these million-dollar businesses, it’s also about disproving the growing media narrative that a yeshiva education doesn’t prepare its alumni for real-world success.

Sam Feder, CEO of Positive Tech Solutions, told JNS that he was a yeshiva boy who got married and then “got forced into figuring something out.” He liked technology, so he and a friend (and then more friends) started an IT company, which handles operations and security for growing businesses.

“They trusted me and then from there, it blew up,” he said. “Fast-forward 18 years, and here we are.”

Braver, the event’s organizer, said a walk around the expo floor should rightly put to rest criticism in the New York Times and elsewhere of yeshiva education.

“Everybody from the news is welcome. Let’s start walking the booths,” he said. “You can see you have multi-million dollar businesses. We’re talking about manufacturing, warehousing, financials, websites, whatever … and half of our people aren’t even here yet.”