Urban Jacksonville

Here is a link to the video of the Jewish Center Auction. This video is basically my experience at the auciton, it is raw and unedited. Fun!

Now on to the information about the buyer. It seems an industrious little reader went out and did some research yesterday. They started at the GSA website by looking up the information on the winning bidder:

According to the GSA, the winning bid was from Mr. Moshe M. Florans. A Google search pulls up a permit statistical report from 2006 on the city of New York website, listing his address as 114 Avenue T in Brooklyn – and a Google search on that address shows that it’s listed as the address for a Mr. Abe Betesh, according to a 2006 sign statistical report, also on the city of NY website. Mr. Betesh appears to be the owner of Abeco Management Corporation.

This is not to the person who won the bid gave false information to the media on who he represented, Platinum Management, this is just where the paper trail is leading.

I did some searching on my own and after about 20 minutes of searching I found a profile of Abe Betesh in the New York Times. A Teen Prodigy Cuts Deals on Tenements was written in 1988 when Abe was still a teenager:

Mr. Betesh may be the youngest (19) of the 104,000 licensed real estate agents in New York State; the records in Albany are unclear. If he isn’t the youngest he is easily the fastest off the mark in his ll months as an agent – a phenomenon streaking through the less-glamorous alleyways of city real estate in which the art of the deal is played out with small apartment houses, brownstones and tenements rather than skyscrapers.

If, for some reason, this link is no longer active, I put a copy of the article on the SPAR messageboard.

After reading the article, the purchase of the Jewish Center makes sense, to me at least. Real estate in New York is crazy expensive. 1.4 million for a Jewish Synagogue in a historic district, on a park, must have be a steal in Abe’s eyes. Taking history into account I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Jewish Center subdivided into rental units.

tags: jacksonville, springfield, jewish center, abe betesh

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 7:10 am and is filed under Springfield. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Downtownparks

Maybe you should do a little more research before you call the residents of Springfield anti-Semitic, and realize the reason we are all concerned about the building is because of what it almost became...

Nice work playing a race/religion card when it was totally unnecessary.
Ian

Looking to flip the property is very common in real-estate. There are businesses looking to move to Jacksonville, as the property is rather cheap as opposed to S. Florida or CA. It is less expensive to purchase an old building and demolish it, just to have access to the land.

As for the person not wanting to talk to the press, that's his obligation. Maybe he gave a false contact and/or name because a lot of people in Jacksonville aren't very friendly to those of the Jewish faith. There are certain hate groups here in Jacksonville that may not like his presence here, if he is in fact Jewish.

There is rich Jewish history here in Jacksonville, as it was the first Orthodox population in Florida. In the 1920's and 30's, some of the population migrated to Miami, as it was the only location in Florida that allowed members of the Jewish community to frequent their hotels.
Lisa Simon

I've heard that the buyers may be looking to flip the property which makes no sense to me. If someone else was willing to spend more money wouldn't they have bid higher at the auction? The whole thing seems pretty strange. The place has been watched 24/7 by private security guards since the auction. What are they worried about and how long are they planning to keep this up? It can't be cheap to keep someone there full time.
John

I'm assuming it wasn't the same guy in the video?
brendon

This is a strange coincidence. Last night a man walked into TSI talking about re-opening the jewelary store next to us and busting a hole through our alley way to attract business from club goers (absolutely dumbest concept to date. drunk people don't want to eat diamonds, they want hot dogs or waffles). He also began talking about how he just purchased a building for 1.4 million. Then this morning I read this post and things start to look fishy. The guy's name was something like Polk. He had quite a few big rings on his finger and spoke with a sort of ivy league accent, definitely not from Jacksonville. It confused us because if the guy had been working with the jewelary store owners for some time (like he said) then he would have known the club existed, but he didn't. He was blown away by the fact that there was one there. To me he is either speaking the truth or just somer shmoe who happened to be at the auction and decided to play a dumb little joke on us, knowing the winner of the Jewish center was hiding his identity. I don't know where I'm going with this. But I thought maybe it would put another link in this confusing chain.

Jewish Center auction video and buyer information

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