Patrons at the Nosh Kosher Café in Tarnow, Poland, pre-pandemic. (Courtesy)
By Bruce Lowitt, Jewish Press of Pinellas County via JTA
TAMPA BAY — Marcia Vineberg was nearly packed and ready to rejoin her
husband.
It’s complicated. They had moved from Vancouver, Canada, to Palm Harbor, Fla. 10 years ago to care for her mother, who had fallen. Harriet Rand, 95, died in December.
Gerald Vineberg, a Canada native who spent half of each year as a businessman traveling in Europe and Asia, wound up opening The Nosh Kosher Café in Tarnow, Poland, three years ago.
Then . . . COVID-19.
Marcia, 69, has been trapped in Palm Harbor, she said, because Poland, part of the European Union, has barred Americans from entry.
Gerald, 72, couldn’t return to Florida because President Donald Trump has banned people from Poland and elsewhere from entering the US.
And the restaurant that had been thriving is in danger of going under because tourism to Tarnow has dropped to a virtual crawl.
“My grandparents came from Tarnow,” Marcia Vineberg said. “They left just before WW I. My great-grandparents told them to go. They went to New York, then to Orlando. Their children, my father and his siblings, lived in Orlando . . .
“My husband was doing business in Cracow about four years ago and I told him, ‘If you have a little bit of time, see where Tarnow is and check it out, tell me what kind of town it is.’ He had some time off so he went and fell in love with it.”
Gerald, speaking by phone from his apartment in Tarnow, said it was 45% Jewish before WW II and 80% of the businesses were owned by Jews. “People are very welcoming,” he said.
“Marcia and I had become very involved in fundraising for the restoration of their Jewish cemetery. It’s the third largest in Poland.”
The cemetery had been desecrated during and after WW II and was ignored by the communist regime afterward. Marcia’s great-grandparents and many relatives are buried there.
“We discovered that most Orthodox or Conservative tours that came from Israel, from Great Britain, from Canada, from the US or wherever did not stay in Tarnow,” he said, “because there was nowhere for them to get a kosher meal.”
Gerald Vineberg had never been a restaurateur. Still, he invested their life savings in opening The Nosh Kosher Café and put more than two years into building the business, not unusual for a restaurant. It serves fish and vegetarian dishes and has its own bakery.
Most of the recipes are from Marcia’s grandparents.
“We tried to have it super-duper Orthodox,” she said, “but we can’t. There’s not enough groceries and not enough people to light the fire (on Shabbat) and do everything.
“We’re finding Conservative and Reform come to dine and the chasidim will come and eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, but that’s it.”
By December they had more than 25 group reservations, some with as many as 80-90 students. A museum in Cracow planned a major conference at the café and the JCC in that city routinely sent groups. Some patrons have told Gerald that they lived in Tarnow as children and left when their parents fled before the war.
“We were on top of the world,” Gerald said. “But [the pandemic] has destroyed it all, pretty much put it under. Virtually all the tours and other groups had to cancel.”
In May, Marcia Vineberg created a GoFundMe account, hoping to help keep the restaurant afloat through the crisis. At the end of July, the effort had netted nearly $1,300 toward its $20,000 goal.
Marcia had visited Tarnow each June for the past three years. Now she’s planning to move back to Vancouver because it will afford her a better opportunity to get to Poland.
If The Nosh Kosher Café ultimately fails, Gerald said, he’ll probably return to Vancouver.
“My life in many ways is here now,” he said, “and I’m not quite sure what I’ll do if I’m faced with that decision [to stay or leave, to sell or keep the café.
“Every Friday when I make it through one more week I say, ‘thank you for that,’ and then see if we can survive for one more week. That’s how it’s been for more than two months.”
