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Mordecai Minzer started his own business by setting up a lab in the basement of his family home in Borough Park. Photo by Jon Kalish<\/p>\nThe business cards on the counter at Minzer\u2019s Optical proclaim \u201c45 years of 15-minute service.\u201d If your wait drags on for longer than 15 minutes, you can pick up one of the prayer books that line a shelf beneath the counter. But there\u2019s no need to pray that your eyeglasses won\u2019t cost you an arm and a leg. Minzer\u2019s is known for its low prices, so customers who are feeling charitable might slip a few shekels into one of the pushkes, the tin tzedakah boxes, on the counter.<\/p>\n
Once known solely within Brooklyn\u2019s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, today a majority of Minzer\u2019s customers are not Haredi Jews, let alone members of the tribe. According to Mordechai Minzer, who started the business when he was just 19, this is entirely the result of word of mouth. And Minzer\u2019s has held on in an age where Internet competitors such as Zenni have come close to matching its prices but can\u2019t offer its speedy, in-person customer service.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an old saying that if you want something fast, good, and cheap, pick any two out of the three. Minzer\u2019s amazingly manages to do all three,\u201d Cheryl Krauss, a Brooklyn jewelry maker who has been a customer for close to 20 years, told me.<\/p>\n
Up a flight of stairs in a two-story building on a block of attached homes, customers peruse shelves and carousels displaying frames that run the length of the store, amid the drone of computerized edging machines that grind lenses. Customers stand across the counter from employees who peer through a pupilometer, a device which measures the distance from the center of one pupil to the center of the other, a critical measurement needed to make accurate lenses.<\/p>\n
Mordecai Minzer started his own business by setting up a lab in the basement of his family home in Borough Park. Photo by Jon Kalish<\/p>\n
Mordechai Minzer, 64, was trained as an optician in Manhattan at the Bramson ORT Institute of Technology, which began in 1942 as a series of workshops for World War II refugees and is part of a global educational network driven by Jewish values. Early in his career, he worked at a Cohen\u2019s Fashion Optical store in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Minzner said he stopped working for them because they wanted him to work on Shabbos. In 1981, a few years after the country western hit \u201cTake This Job and Shove It\u201d hit the airwaves, Minzer quit his job. It\u2019s unlikely Minzer, the son of a Bobover Hasid, heard the song on the radio, but he sure did know the words to the chorus.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worked very hard there at Cohen\u2019s and they schmatte-ed me,\u201d he said, using the Yiddish word for \u201crag\u201d as a verb.<\/p>\n
So, Minzer started his own business by setting up a lab in the basement of his family home in Borough Park, making eyeglasses for wholesale customers. He also made glasses on the side for friends and students at his yeshiva.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy customers told other people about it and before I knew it, it exploded. I charged a quarter of the price that Cohen\u2019s charged for the same stuff and I did the glasses on the spot,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Shulem Deen, author of the memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, remembers going to Minzer\u2019s when he was growing up in Borough Park where his family was part of the Krasna Hasidic community. Deen said he was about 11 when word of the new optician spread.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuddenly there\u2019s this new place everybody was talking about and the prices for glasses were ridiculous,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI remember that every time I went there to the basement, the place was packed.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/pushke-2-copy-279x300.jpeg\")
The Minzer tzedakah box for those feeling charitable. Photo by Jon Kalish<\/p>\n
Deen, a keen observer of the Haredi Jewish world he left behind, said that because Jewish boys focus on the tiny text during Talmud study, it\u2019s no wonder that so many of them need spectacles.<\/p>\n
Back then, Minzer\u2019s served frum Jews exclusively. But, over the years, Mordechai Minzer said, many of his observant Jewish customers went elsewhere because they had gotten \u201cspoiled.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want certain very expensive frame styles like Lindberg and I don\u2019t want to carry $500 frames here,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to get involved with that. They still come here, but they\u2019re only 30% of my clientele.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Minzer\u2019s ties to Haredi Brooklyn remain strong. He owns two sefer torahs, one of which was written to honor his parents. The scrolls are lent to yeshivas in New Jersey that don\u2019t own sefer torahs. Every year he goes to the yeshivas to inspect them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever I go to check up on my sefer torahs, polish the silver a bit, this and that, they always ask me to make them glasses,\u201d Minzer said.<\/p>\n
This has been a routine for more than 20 years. He goes a few weeks before Purim, and brings a box of inexpensive frames and optical instruments. He then proceeds to make more than a hundred pairs of free glasses for the boys.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to see the kids smiling,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
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Some light reading while you wait for your eyeglasses. Photo by Jon Kalish<\/p>\n
Zenni and other online eyewear retailers have taken a toll on his business in recent years, Minzer said, adding that one of the big advantages he has is that customers who come to the store can try on the frames and see how they look before deciding whether to buy them. And in an era when fewer and fewer opticians still have a lab on the premises, Minzer\u2019s can often make customers new glasses while they wait, and even dip them into sunglass tints on the spot.<\/p>\n
One Jewish customer told me she felt uncomfortable as a non-Orthodox single woman walking into Minzer\u2019s wearing pants but added, \u201cthat may be me projecting.\u201d Another Jewish woman, whose husband advised her to dress modestly before her first visit, scoffed at the advice after seeing other customers wearing tank tops and shorts.<\/p>\n
A Manhattan painter who had never been to Minzer\u2019s recently paid less than $300 to have lenses made for her complex progressives prescription. The previous pair she had purchased at another store cost between $700 and $800. Pamela Hecht was reluctant to make the 40-minute subway ride from her loft in Manhattan to Borough Park but decided to make the schlep after learning what her new lenses would cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a long trip out there on the train but I will do it again because my lenses cost so much less than what I have been paying,\u201d she told me. \u201cI was very dubious that the quality was going to be sufficient. How could the price be so low without cutting corners? But the quality is very good. I\u2019m very satisfied.\u201d<\/p>\n
The post The Jewish secret to affordable eyewear that isn\u2019t so secret anymore<\/a> appeared first on The Forward<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n Post Views: 8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The business cards on the counter at Minzer\u2019s Optical proclaim \u201c45 years of 15-minute service.\u201d If your wait…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-672127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}