Jewish Business Network Returns to Ft. Myers

The Jewish Business Network of Southwest Florida is making a comeback by popular demand.

After more than a year and a half of inactivity, Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz of the Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida will revive the group at a kick-off event on Wednesday.

“People have been wanting it for a while,” Minkowicz said. “The cry was pretty loud.”

When the group started in 2006, businessmen and women would come to socialize, nosh on top-shelf kosher food and make business connections. More importantly it was the final piece that tied the organization’s many programs together, he said.

“The Jewish Business Network was the missing link,” he said. “You need institutions, you need buildings, you need facilities, but then you need people.”

Since Minkowicz arrived in Southwest Florida in 1992, he’s been involved in developing several programs for the Jewish community.

He helped open up a chabad synagogue and started a kosher food service to supply the Jewish community. Minkowicz and his wife, Nechamie, also opened up a mikvah, a special bath that Jewish women use once a month, and the Maimonides Hebrew Day School.

In 2010, the business network took a back seat, when other projects became more pressing. The Chabad Lubavitch had an ongoing project to build a Jewish Community Center that needed more time and attention. The director of the Maimonides Hebrew Day School also left the area and Minkowicz and his wife, Nechamie, stepped in to have a more hands-on management style, he said.

They used the time to improve operations at the school and apply for government grants and funding, he said.

Shawn Seliger, with the Law Office of Shawn Seliger, said he’s met people during the program’s first run who had become friends over the years, but had also made some business connections at the events too.

He sees the network meetings as an opportunity for people of all faiths to come together and exchange ideas, he said.

“It’s pretty much what you make of it,” Seliger said. “I’m looking forward to see what they put together.”

Dr. Jonathan Daitch and Dr. Michael Frey will be hosting the first event at their practice, Advance Pain Management and Spine Specialists in Fort Myers. Joshua A. Sky, a business coach and trainer, will share his know-how in the industry.

Minkowicz anticipates a couple hundred people may attend the event, and 30 people have become members of the network in the past couple of weeks, he said.

To start the group off strong, Dr. James and Betty Rubenstein donated an undisclosed amount of seed money. With the funds, Minkowicz said he’s been able to hire some assistants to build up the website, develop a social media presence and “really take this thing to where it needs to be,” he said.

Amy Padilla, the marketing director at Gulf Coast Symphony, said she and her husband, Osvaldo, were active in the group while they owned Waddy World Productions, a video production company.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said. “… It was supposed to be a networking sort of thing, but it really ended up being as much social as networking.”

Padilla, couldn’t quite put her finger on what made the network group a standout program, but said it helped that she knew many of the attendees. They were people she saw while her son was still going to bar mitzvah training, people she saw at temple or at parties for friend’s bar mitzvahs, she said.

“I was a lot less nervous going to those things because I knew them a lot better,” Padilla said.