“There must have been five or six people in the room and I explained to them his vision for the cheese and that there was a certain market niche there that he was trying to cover,” Schaffer said. “So I was educating them a bit about that aspect of kosher and chalav Yisrael that it had made sense to me and I felt that he was working to bring it to fruition. I didn’t believe that some sort of Ponzi scheme or a scheme to defraud investors existed. I told them that’s not what he’s about. They told me that people who invested in Saratoga Cheese had a complaint against him because they felt he was trying to defraud them.”
In his prospectus Rosenbaum noted that “we succeeded in developing a complete business plan for implementation and were reviewed for financing. At that time in 2012, Dr. Richard Hamill, my close friend of 26 years, died of cancer. There was a loss in confidence by investors I had brought to the company” Rosenbaum noted.
According to the United Jewish Federation of New York, there are approximately 1.76 million Jews in the eight-county New York metropolitan area, 336,000 of whom abide by chalav Yisrael. Those consumers represent approximately 19 percent of the total Jewish population in the New York City metro area.
Clarification: My article in the July 1 issue, “Rabbi Roy Feldman: From Manhattan’s KJ To Albany’s CBAJ,” stated that Rabbi Feldman “grew up in a secular Jewish household in Israel.” Rabbi Feldman’s parents are Israeli but he grew up in a secular Jewish household in New York City.
