Floridians since 1973, Rabbi Howard Greenstein’s work kept them in Jacksonville, Florida, in a huge congregation with a religious school for 23 years. A small retirement community congregation on Marco Island needed a rabbi just as Rabbi Greenstein was looking to retire. Lenore, a freelance journalist wrote up the Ritz-Carlton Naples in ’91 or ’92, when Naples was just a sleepy town. The Greensteins moved to Collier County in 1996 and settled in Fiddler’s Creek.
Jewish Congregation of Marco Island (JCMI) was started around 1990 when two realtors, Elena Rosner and Marjorie Seltzer, heard that Deltona Development was giving away a parcel of land to the churches, so they decided that they would love to have a synagogue on Marco. They put an ad in the local paper asking Jewish people interested in starting up a Jewish community center to come to a meeting. About a dozen people came. It was a ‘lay congregation’ in the beginning. Rabbi Greenstein was at JCMI ten years until his passing. He started the program on Judaic and Holocaust Studies at FGCU with Ann Jacobsen’s financial support in establishment of a center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies. The three of them together Ann Jacobsen, Lenore and Howard Greenstein began the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue
Lenore continues his legacy by staying involved in many of the groups Rabbi Greenstein started.