Fruchtman was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants.
[3][4] In 1956, Paramount chairman of the board Adolph Zukor selected Fruchtman's New Theater as one of the first cinemas to screen Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.
Following white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s, movie attendance fell at JF Theatres.
[6] Physical damage to facilities owned by JF Theatres was generally minimal.
However, according to the film historian Robert Headley, the "psychic damage to the theater going public was terrible" and a wave of cinemas closed in the following decade.