After a devastating fire did severe damage to a popular Fair Lawn shopping center in the pre-dawn hours of Friday morning, the Jewish community woke up to the awful news. Zaides Kosher Bake Shop, Fair Lawn Roadhouse, and Mashu Mashu Kosher Sushi Bar were  mostly destroyed beyond repair.

While the fire had started at Green Dragon Asian Cuisine (a non-kosher restaurant in the same shopping center), it spread across the roof of the strip mall and the ensuing combination of fire and fire suppression efforts left the businesses with collapsed roofs, smoke damage and standing water.

The shock and pain hit the community and business owners, and although no one was injured, the stores were not salvageable. Then late on Friday afternoon, Fair Lawn Roadhouse owner Moshe Berow received notice that the building was to be boarded up and condemned as soon as Saturday. If that were to happen, he might never get access to the inside of the restaurant before the building would be torn down and destroyed.

While some of that information eventually proved to be untrue, Berow had very little time before Shabbat and almost no choice of what to do. He had to try and get anything of value out of the building, or as much as he could. Though that sounds fairly simple, it would be easier said than done. Much of the equipment he wanted to save was quite heavy. And even if he had the necessary power to get it out the door… where would it go? And how would he get it there?

At 6:21 p.m. Berow put out the call on two local WhatsApp chats. With his own shul (Congregation Darchei Noam) having their early Shabbat minyan at 6:35 p.m., Berow wondered how much help he would be able to find.

“In truth, I didn’t expect anyone to come,” Berow said, in a letter that he wrote to the community on Saturday night. “It was nearly candle lighting time for early Shabbat, and everyone has their own last minute insanity.” (see sidebar for full text of the letter)

But with the going getting tough, the tough got going. The word quickly spread across town that there was work to be done. 

“Several people showed up, and I set about trying to give direction on what was most important, and got back to work myself,” said Berow about the beginning of the relief effort. “Sometime later, maybe around 7 p.m., I walked outside carrying something to discover that nearly 60 of my friends and neighbors had shown up and were busy getting things done!”

Luckily for Berow, most of the damage to the building was in the front because of where the fire had spread. That meant that there was an opportunity to rescue expensive items from the back entrance and kitchen, assuming there were enough people to help move some really heavy equipment. Another factor was the fact that power had been cut to the building. The kitchen was therefore completely dark, and trying to move through debris with flashlights was not the easiest task.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. The group was able to accomplish a great deal in a very limited amount of time and as people showed up with every minivan, SUV or pickup truck they could find, the stuff started to get loaded into everyone’s personal vehicles with a rented U-Haul trailer mixed in for some of the really large items.

As Shabbat neared and the job was done, Berow could not fathom the sense of community that he felt.

“I’ve rarely felt as much love and connection as I did from those embraces I got late Erev Shabbat from dozens of people I am privileged to call friends,” Berow said about the Fair Lawn community.

But it wasn’t just Berow who received help. With that many people around, there were hands to spare. Dina Margelovich had shown up to assist Berow, but she enlisted the help of a group of people in rescuing items from Flynn’s Barbershop, the space directly next door to Roadhouse.

Jess Flynn and her husband Shae built the barbershop during covid while she was pregnant with their son. They built a nursery in the back of the shop because both of them worked there and it made things easier for their family. The barbershop was truly like a second home for them.

Not only were the volunteers able to rescue five very expensive and heavy barber chairs, but they also helped Flynn clear sentimental items out of the nursery. When she didn’t have a way to move the chairs or a place to put them in the interim, somebody volunteered their garage and they loaded up the stuff.

“It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” said Flynn about the Kiddush Hashem. “Within 20 minutes they got all the chairs loaded up because they were going to close the gates to the property.

“I literally could not believe it. I was in awe. Nobody knew us or had to help us. But the fact that (Berow) could send a message and get that kind of help was incredible. I’m so thankful they were there for me and my family.”

Margelovich thought that what she and others did was the obvious thing to do.

“Being part of a community means that you celebrate the good times and you’re together in the bad times,” she said about the events of Friday afternoon. “There’s a time to give and there’s a time to take. And this was a time when people needed help.”

The fire destroyed Roadhouse exactly five months from the first day of their soft opening. They were planning an official grand opening and ribbon-cutting in the coming weeks. But despite the fire, Berow is looking towards the future.

“What’s next? We will just have to wait and see what options are out there,” Berow said. “We are focused on recapturing the momentum we had just started to gain and moving forward.”

Hopefully, the equipment the group salvaged from Roadhouse will be a great help in that effort. Because of the late hour, almost everything from Roadhouse spent all of Shabbat, Saturday night, and Sunday morning in people’s cars and vans. Berow was able to rent a storage unit to house everything on Sunday afternoon. At that point, a call went out for people to help unload stuff at the storage unit.

To nobody’s surprise, Berow wasn’t short on volunteers.