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After 16 years, Park Place restaurant in Highland Park will be closing permanently on Sunday, June 4th, 2023. A new kosher meat restaurant will hopefully be taking over and will continue to serve the Highland Park, Edison, and New Brunswick communities.

Until then, Park Place will be open for customers to enjoy all their favorites such as Hot Bites, The Park Burger, and BBQ Ribs.

For those seeking to dine there before the restaurant’s closing, here’s their current menu.

Once they close, diners can find a kosher meat meal at Bridge Turkish & Mediterranean Grill in Highland Park, which became kosher in 2019.

Park Place will observe their regular hours of Sunday – Thursday: 11:30am – 9:00pm and is located at 120 Raritan Ave, Highland Park, NJ.

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With the military situation in Israel and global public opinion becoming more concerning, Eric Pelofsky, a resident of Highland Park, noticed an Israeli flag hanging outside Pino’s, a bar and liquor store in town. Noting that Pino’s often hosted special events supporting various groups, he had the idea to create a fundraiser and evening of support for Israel for the Highland Park and surrounding communities. Pelofsky worked with Pino’s management, initially intending to sponsor a keg of beer and some kosher pretzels and snacks, and arranged that the Jewish Federation in the Heart of New Jersey would be the beneficiary of any funds raised from the admission fee.

Notices went out over social media and word spread like wildfire throughout the community. Giddy’s Pizza of East Brunswick donated 10 pizza pies that were delivered to the event and an anonymous donor paid for an additional five. The event was held on Thursday, October 26 and the venue was packed with a standing-room-only crowd shortly after the start time of 8 p.m.

Jason Postelnik, a member of the Highland Park Borough Council, remarked on the “amazing turnout” and said “this is the most crowded event I’ve seen at Pino’s.” He thanked Pino’s for supporting the Jewish community at this time.

The unusually mild weather allowed people to take advantage of the outdoor picnic table seating at the front and side of the store, where Highland Park residents Joel Zevin and Shlomo Peleg enjoyed their beer. “With all the negative anti-Israel news, it is good to see such a large turnout in support for Israel,” said Zevin.

“It is nice to see so many Jews of all types coming to support Israel,” added Peleg.

Laura Safran, director of community impact for Federation confirmed that 330 people were in attendance. “We raised over $3,700 from ticket sales and donations. In addition, many people visited Pino’s liquor store and made purchases throughout the day to express appreciation for their support.”

Pino’s co-owner, Siobhan Commerford, originally put the flag up in acknowledgement of one of the establishment’s bartenders who was called back to Israel for active duty. She was surprised at some of the backlash and hatred that came as a result. “People were coming in and yelling at us for supporting Israel. My Irish-Catholic background came out and I was determined to not back down. I wasn’t sure if having the Israeli flag was the smart thing to do, but I know it was the right thing to do.”

Commerford added, “Once word got out about our support in the Jewish community, people have been stopping by all day. Our inventory of kosher wines and spirits has been seriously depleted by the many unexpected additional customers who have stopped by.”

As Lori Resnick of Highland Park remarked: “The Jewish community knows how to support our local businesses that are supporting Israel.”

Support for the event was not limited to the Highland Park/Edison area. Safran confirmed that “someone from Israel called in a donation to the bar in thanks, and an anonymous donor even gave their credit card and asked that the bar tap it to pay for additional beer or wine if reserves were depleted, since the person couldn’t make it to the event.”

David Seiden (formerly from Highland Park) came to the event from Linden with his wife Rebecca. He said: “I came to support Israel and the community of Highland Park, which I know has some really grounded ties with Israel.”

East Brunswick residents Bill Kokkianis and Chris Fedosh, neither of whom is Jewish, came to show support for their Jewish friends. Kokkianis grew up in Highland Park and has maintained ties to the community. Both are appalled at what happened on October 7 and are distressed at the negative world reaction to Israel’s actions to keep their country safe, and they felt it important that the Jewish community know they are not alone.

Pelofsky was thrilled with the turnout. He planned the event and would have considered it a success if 150 people came. “The attendance is unbelievable.”

There were at least four rabbis in attendance and people from all denominations of Judaism. Safran noted, “The audience really skewed younger, which is fabulous. Spirits were high, and many people paid more than the actual requested $5 in support of Jewish Federation’s Israel Emergency Campaign. So far, our Federation has raised more than $400,000. Across the country, the Jewish Federation movement is raising $500 million.”

Safran continued, “I really feel the evening’s incredible success could be credited to the pervasive feeling of achdus, connection to one another, not only through our collective compassion and support for Israel, but also because—as different as we are—we are one Jewish people; one Jewish community. The half joke is that we should do it every Thursday night.”

All of the funds raised will go directly to Israel for food and financial assistance for impacted citizens: The Jewish Agency for Israel’s Funds for Victims of Terror, trauma relief and psychosocial care, Emergency Medical Services and more. Those interested in donating should visit www.Jewishheartj.org/email-donate to add their support.

A New Jersey pastor with decades of experience resettling refugees from across the world has housed around 350 migrants in apartments in towns all across the state, where after an initial buffer period, they pay the full rent.

For years, Seth Kaper-Dale, a pastor at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, which runs an associated affordable housing nonprofit, has overseen resettlement of refugees through the State Department with federal funds.

But as a surge of migrants crossed the southern U.S. border seeking asylum in 2022, the nonprofit expanded its model to house asylum seekers who weren’t eligible for any federal aid for the first time, with the help of a $400,000 grant from an anonymous foundation for this purpose.

The premise is simple. Newly arriving migrants, who often aren’t immediately eligible to receive federal aid or work papers often find off-the-books gigs. In Kaper-Dale’s assessment, their main hurdle to housing themselves isn’t an inability to pay rent. Rather, it’s the difficulty of securing a lease without a bank account, credit history or enough cash in hand to cover a security deposit and first and last month’s rent up front.

“Landlords make you jump through all those hoops. None of these people will be able to jump through all these hoops,” Kaper-Dale said on a recent afternoon outside his Highland Park home base, which serves as a hub for career services, English classes, childcare, meal service, and a self-file clinic to help people submit their asylum claims or Temporary Protected Status applications. “We have to help [people] through the hoops.”

That’s where the Reformed Church of Highland Park Housing Corporation forges relationships with landlords, signing leases, covering the upfront costs, and even furnishing units all at a cost averaging just over $5,000 per person. The nonprofit pays the landlord each month, while migrants pay the nonprofit after the first month with wiggle room up front on a case-by-case basis as people get on their feet.

“Landlords are the key to this whole thing. They don’t need to be playing social worker to a whole bunch of people in need, or to take risks with people. We don’t want them taking risks. We want to be taking the risk,” Kaper-Dale said.

“Taking the risk on ourselves is so much less expensive than carrying the ball forever and making people move in the direction of complete and total reliance.”

They place people in units where they’re confident they’ll be able to pay rent, say, putting six single men in a three-bedroom or a family of three in a one-bedroom. The vast majority of people who move into their units are able to pay rent on their own within a few months, Kaper-Dale said.

“People are taking care of themselves because that’s what people do,” he said. “Those who are coming in, who’ve walked through eight countries, are not the same people who need very low income affordable housing. These are folks who expect to have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as every immigrant population has done.”The New Jersey program offers potential lessons for New York City, which has struggled to help migrants move out of city-run shelters into private housing and has resorted to kicking some families out after 60 days and single adults after just 30 days.

Many families have remained in shelters for months, at a steep cost to taxpayers, with the city spending $388 a day, or around $11,000 a month. Of the more than 180,000 migrants who’ve entered city shelters over the past two years, around 64,000 remain.

The state’s limited resettlement program has been plagued with bureaucratic delays. Nearly a year since its launch, the program has only managed to move 197 families out of shelter in nearly a year, of a promised 1,250.

‘A Blessing’

Families have found their way to the Reformed Church of Highland Park almost exclusively by word of mouth, from advocates, community groups and sometimes other migrants. Such was the case for Dave and Mayra, who arrived in New Jersey with their 15-year-old daughter from Colombia after crossing the border in early January. They asked that their last names not be published for fear of immigration consequences.

An offer from a friend to put the family up fell through, leaving them no place to go. The family ended up in an overcrowded shelter at a church in Gutenberg, N. J.

“We were in the street,” Mayra said. “We had nowhere to sleep.”

While New York City opened a central intake for arriving migrants at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, there’s no such location in New Jersey or its cities. Faith organizations and nonprofits have stepped in to try and fill the gap, NJ.com reported.

Then the family had a stroke of good luck. Mayra called a friend in Miami, who called a friend in New Jersey, who linked them up to the church program. They sent the family an Uber and put them up in a hotel for a few days while they readied a $1,700-a-month one-bedroom apartment in Metuchen. Within a few days, the family moved in.

The apartment came fully furnished. Both husband and wife are working in a restaurant near their apartment.

“It’s so cozy, there are some days we don’t even want to leave,” Mayra said.

Mayra’s husband Dave said having the apartment has eased his mind.

“It’s a place to start, to work and save, and pay for our own rent, and start to have our things,” he said.

Another participant in the church program, Margoth, 33, a single mother from Ecuador, has spent almost a year in a house rented through the church. She also asked that her last name not be published out of concern for potential immigration consequences. Margoth, who works in a nearby restaurant, shares the house with her two cousins and their children, and the extended family members share responsibilities. Margoth’s portion of the rent is $1,000, for a room she shares with her two children.

“I feel tranquility there,” she said in Spanish.

A friend from Ecuador who ended up living in a New York City shelter struggled with life there, Margoth said, including constant surveillance from staff and a prohibition against cooking, with outside food confiscated at the door. Her friend ended up moving back to Ecuador.

“On the one hand you save money in rent, but it’s not the same,” Margoth said in Spanish. “It’s not a place to have a normal life.”

‘Skin in The Game’

Over the past two decades the Reformed Church of Highland Park has expanded its footprint, renting out many of the apartments above storefronts on the town’s main downtown strip for arriving refugees, as well as woodshop where volunteers train recent arrivals in woodworking (They making bunk beds and dressers to use in the program’s leased apartments.)

At an adjoining free store, people newly entering the program can stock up on warm clothes and other necessities. The church group also initially covered the first three months’ rent, before scaling that back, Kaper-Dale said.

“If they got a little bit of money in their pocket, [they] get some skin in the game here right off the bat,” he said. “We make it clear with folks, this is about self-sufficiency. If you can’t pay, we’ll have very real conversations with you in a couple months.”

Central to the program’s success are relationships with landlords, said Kaper-Dale. He’s developed relationships with certain landlords who now flag open apartments as they become available. For a three-bedroom renting at $2,400, he might go back and forth with a landlord over who will live there.

“He says, ‘You can put six in there. ’I say, ‘Are you okay if it’s three families of two, or if it’s six single men?’”

“They’re all able to pay $400 bucks in a month,” he said. “There’s nobody who can’t.”

Unlike New York’s resettlement program, which makes migrants the leaseholders, the church housing corporation holds the lease. The state’s resettlement program pays a year of rent directly to the landlords, after which the tenant is expected to pay the rent on their own to the landlords.

In the case of the Reformed Church of Highland Park program, the church pays the landlord rent, while tenants pay the church, an arrangement that can be appealing to property owners.

Frank Assuncao, a landlord with the company Penny Properties LLC, worked with Kaper-Dale for around two years, renting out a dozen units to the church.

“I’m dealing with two or three guys in the office at the church for 15 tenants, which is great,” he said.

Assuncao said his main concern is turnover, sometimes without notice. At one of his units a couple had been renting, all of a sudden he found four men living there with no warning. Kaper-Dale said people in his program regularly move on to other rentals or other cities and states as they make more connections and find other work opportunities, and they work to quickly find new participants to take their place.

“So the communication from them could be a little bit better,” he said, but overall, “it’s definitely a positive experience.”

Kaper-Dale said while families sometimes fall behind if they lose work or have other disruptions, the church has a funding buffer to help them catch up.

“If somebody totally blows us off, we’ll say, ‘Move on. This isn’t for you,’” he said. “We have our frustrations from time to time. But mostly it works. There’s always a few people who are going to take advantage.”

New York City advocates grappling with the migrant housing crisis are eyeing the New Jersey program with interest.

Dave Giffen, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said that while he is concerned about the renters’ lack of tenancy rights, which could leave them vulnerable to eviction, New York City should consider any novel program that might help more people move out of hotels, tents and warehouses: “I’m open to any creative solutions that are helping people get stabilized into housing.”

The scoreboard at Point Pleasant Beach said 46-29, but for the Highland Park football team, those numbers in lights represented so much more than just a much sought-after victory.

The 46-29 win was not just the program’s first since 2016, but for these Owls, it was a forceful removal of the burden of a 51-game losing streak, the longest in the state, that had been affixed to their shoulders.

Complete Box Score »

“We needed this win so badly. It was a well-deserved win. I think this win, to be honest, moved mountains,” Highland Park coach Shawn Harrison said. “Just to get that (losing streak) off your chest, I think was monumental.

“The losing of the games all year long, just this year alone, was weighing heavily on them. Let alone these last five, six years without a win.”

Highland Park led for most of Thursday’s game, but it knew it couldn’t let up or it would risk closing the year with another near-win that ended in a heartbreaking defeat.

Instead Highland Park answered back in the face of adversity when a 12-point halftime lead had shrunk to three.

On a 4th-and-6 junior quarterback Markos Hantsoulis spun out of trouble and found his cousin, Stamatis Hantsoulis wide open on the left sideline for a 29-yard touchdown that made it 38-29 with 7:14 left in the game.

About 90 seconds later, Stamatis’ twin brother, Konstantinos Hantsoulis jumped in front of a Point Pleasant Beach for an interception and sprinted down the right sideline for a 60-plus-yard touchdown that not only made it a three-possession game, but allowed the Owls to realize its dream of a win was on the verge of happening.

“You would have thought there were 100 kids on that sideline with the way they yelled out a roar,” said Harrison. “When (Konstantinos) was in the clear, the kids finally saw that we were at the doorstep of winning this ballgame. Their eyes just got so big and they knew that that win was right there.”

The three members of the Hantsoulis family had a hand in all seven of Highland Park’s touchdowns.

Markos opened the scoring with a 40-yard touchdown pass to Konstantinos just 96 seconds into the game. The lead was short-lived as Point Pleasant Beach’s Thomas Wagner took the ensuing kickoff back for a TD.

Markos Hantsoulis gave Highland Park the lead for good with a 4-yard TD run that made it 12-8, 32 seconds into the second quarter. A 37-yard TD pass to Jowan Keyes followed and, after Point Pleasant Beach made it 18-14 after a Liam Brosnan TD run, Markos Hantsoluis found Konstantinos for a 60-yards score with 1:06 left in the half that pushed the lead to 12 heading into halftime.

Markos Hantsoulis threw four touchdown passes and ran for two scores as well. According to Harrison, two of the TD passes came on broken plays, including the 29-yard TD pass to Stamatis that gave Highland Park the cushion it desperately needed to ensure this night would end with celebration rather than sorrow.

When the clock struck zeros and the final whistle was sounded, tears flowed from both Highland Park players and coaches alike as Harrison was embraced by senior Danny Sanchez and others afterwards. Harrison was given a Gatorade shower and the Owls celebrated on the bus ride back to Highland Park.

Since Harrison took over as head coach in 2019, Highland Park’s roster has nearly doubled as nearly 40 players are now in the program. This is also the second consecutive season that the Owls have had a JV team, a group that is well over .500 this fall.

All are signs of progress and promising signs for the future, but it pales in comparison to what Thursday night’s win meant to a program that had gone nearly seven full years without one.

“I know our record was 1-9 with this win it felt like we were undefeated this season,” Harrison said. “That’s how much the win tonight meant to us,” said Harrison. “We felt like an actual champion and that we actually accomplished something. That’s how much the win meant for this entire program.”

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