Eight years later, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin’spersonal Chanukah miracle is still lighting up the darkest nights
But how did it happen? Two decades ago, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, who’d created a flourishing kehillah in Postville, Iowa, where he was vice president of Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the US, was known as a larger-than-life baal chesed, someone everyone turned to, even his hundreds of non-Jewish employees. But how did he evolve from that into one of the biggest spiritual mashpiim on the Jewish landscape?
Back in 1987, Avrohom Aron Rubashkin, a Lubavitcher chassid and successful butcher and restauranteur in Brooklyn, opened the Iowa slaughterhouse and appointed his son Sholom Mordechai, who at the time was on shlichus with his wife, Leah, and young family in Atlanta, as vice president. Within ten years, Agriprocessors was one of the largest meat-packing plants in the country.
With a constant stream of shochtim converging on the small town, the Rubashkins established a full-service kehillah, with schools, a mikveh, and even a yeshivah for bochurim (Benny Friedman was one of them) who dormed in the Rubashkins’ rambling, energetic home. He also provided a communal structure for his non-Jewish employees, building them a community center and even paying for their children’s medical and dental care.
It was the community of dreams, until the helicopters that blackened the skies over Postville in May of 2008 turned it into a nightmare. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security swooped in, military style. With helicopters hovering above, 600 agents raided the plant and arrested 389 undocumented workers — at the time, the largest workplace raid in the United States.
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