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Title: Kosher slaughterhouse owners surrounded by scandal
Source:
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URL Source: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5 ... iXOIscqxYjzf5ujU_auQQD92BLCS80
Published: Aug 5, 2008
Author: DAVID B. CARUSO
Post Date: 2008-08-05 04:53:18 by Disgusted
Keywords: None
Views: 128
Comments: 9
Kosher slaughterhouse owners surrounded by scandal By DAVID B. CARUSO – 13 hours ago NEW YORK (AP) — Two decades ago, the Rubashkin family of Brooklyn opened up a kosher slaughterhouse amid the cornfields of Iowa — not exactly a center of Jewish culture. The bearded, fedora-wearing strangers from Brooklyn quickly transformed Postville into its own small-town melting pot. Immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico began arriving in great numbers to work at the slaughterhouse. Soon, the town was home to churches and temples, and the shelves of the grocery stores were stocked with tortillas and bagels. Lately, though, the Rubashkins' grand cultural experiment seems to have lost any chance at a feel-good ending. The family's Iowa business, Agriprocessors, the nation's biggest supplier of kosher meat, was raided by U.S. immigration agents in May. Nearly 400 workers, mostly Guatemalans, were swept up and jailed and are likely to be deported as illegal immigrants. Labor organizers and workers have also accused the company of exploiting its employees, tolerating abusive behavior by managers and illegally hiring teenagers to work on the factory floor. A few Jewish groups have questioned whether the plant, given its problems, should keep its kosher certification. It all adds up to a mess for a family that has never sought attention, and now feels it is being attacked unfairly, especially by the media. "The press? Terrible!" the family's patriarch, Aaron Rubashkin, told a reporter with the Jewish news service JTA during a rare interview in June. He said allegations that the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants and children and tolerated abusive conditions were all lies. "I wish everybody would be treated like we treat people," he said. Attempts to arrange an interview with Rubashkin this week were not successful. His representatives told The Associated Press that the 80-year-old butcher had traveled to Iowa from Brooklyn, where he still runs the family's half-century-old butcher shop. The family's history, though, is well documented. Aaron Rubashkin and his wife, Rivka, fled the Soviet Union after World War II and settled in Brooklyn, a world center of Hasidic Judaism. Rivka's uncles, the family has said, had been imprisoned in Siberia because of their religious beliefs. In the 1950s, Aaron founded a kosher meat market in the city's Borough Park section. The family prospered in America. Then, in 1987, the Rubashkins made an incredible leap: Looking for a way to bolster an unreliable supply of kosher beef, the family bought an abandoned non-kosher meatpacking plant in tiny Postville, Iowa. Two of Aaron's sons moved to Postville to oversee the plant, and a steady stream of Hasidic families followed. Soon, Postville, then a town of around 1,500 people, found itself drawing immigrant laborers, too. Suddenly, the town was infused with rabbis and other Jews, Guatemalans and Mexicans, expatriates from former Soviet Republics — and a host of new ethnic tensions. The town became a regular stop for out-of-town reporters looking for a story about America's diversity. A documentary crew visited. National Geographic did a pictorial. Journalism professor Stephen Bloom wrote a book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America." Amid it all, the company was a huge success, with popular brands such as Aaron's Best and Rubashkin's. By 2006, Agriprocessors had a second plant in Nebraska, run in partnership with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and annual revenue of $250 million. In 2004, however, the animal rights group PETA recorded a gruesome video of the company's operation that showed cattle staggering about in apparent pain after their throats had been slit and their tracheas partly removed. Agriprocessors, while defending its techniques as a religious ritual, agreed to change some practices. One of Aaron's sons, the influential Brooklyn rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 2002 after writing $325,000 in bad checks related to a family textile business. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison. A son-in-law, Menachim Balkany, a political fundraiser who hobnobbed with mayors and congressmen, was charged in 2003 with misusing a $700,000 federal grant. The prosecution was dropped when he agreed to make restitution. Agriprocessors also found itself battling a lawsuit filed by a bankruptcy trustee overseeing the remnants of a New York health and beauty supply company whose owner had pleaded guilty to a multimillion-dollar bank fraud. The trustee said the company, Allou Distributors, had a host of suspicious transactions on its books, including $2.9 million in unexplained payments to Agriprocessors. The lawsuit demanded Agriprocessors return the payments, which it claimed were part of the scheme to hide Allou's assets. Agriprocessors insisted it did nothing wrong and had been supplying Allou with surplus meat, but it agreed last summer to pay $1.4 million to settle the case. More trouble may lie on the horizon. Moshe Rubashkin pleaded guilty this year to storing hazardous waste without a permit at a defunct, family-owned textile plant in Allentown, Pa. His son pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents during the investigation. They have yet to be sentenced. Supporters say the Rubashkins are no scofflaws, just unsophisticated businessmen who made some mistakes as their company grew. "These are simple people. They are a family of butchers," said Dovid Eliezrie, a California rabbi who has been assisting the family with the media. Scott Frotman, a spokesman for the Food and Commercial Workers union, had a different take, calling the company's treatment of its immigrant work force "morally reprehensible." "They blame the media. They blame us. They refuse to accept responsibility for anything that is going on in that plant," he said. State and federal investigators are looking into various alleged violations at the company, such as employing underage employees, not paying workers, improperly using hazardous chemicals and not having alarms that could be heard by employees. The Rubashkins have not been charged. "We are God-fearing people and we believe in the American system and we believe it will ultimately turn out OK," Getzel Rubashkin, 24, a grandson of the family's patriarch and an employee at Agriprocessors, told The AP in a recent interview. He also said the family hasn't given up on Postville, which he has called home since age 10. "There are people who would like to see us leave, but on the whole we have very warm relations," he said
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#1. To: Disgusted (#0)
Bullshit. These are your typical N.Y. kikes. Scott Frotman, a spokesman for the Food and Commercial Workers union, had a different take, calling the company's treatment of its immigrant work force "morally reprehensible." Hiring illegals is akin to slavery while it destroys the economy of the natives.
#2. To: noone222 (#1)
Behind every insult to America is a Jew. POSTVILLE, Iowa (JTA) -- When busloads of Jews from Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin started pulling up outside St. Bridget’s Catholic Church Sunday morning, and more than 350 people, some sporting yarmulkes, poured out to take part in a big immigration rally planned for the afternoon, locals noticed. “We weren’t expecting so many Jews to show up,” said Alicia Lopez. A Mexican native and former employee of Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat plant, Lopez was one of nearly 400 undocumented workers arrested in a May 12 immigration raid at the factory. Like four dozen other women released to take care of dependent children, her right ankle is encased in a heavy tracking device that keeps her under virtual house arrest as she awaits trial and, likely, eventual deportation. Witnesses in D.C. rip federal raid never met a Jewish person in Mexico, and the impressions she developed during her seven years here were not flattering. They were her bosses, the guys who didn’t give her raises, the guys she blames for not warning her and the other workers that La Migra -- the immigration police -- was on its way. “I thought badly of them,” she said bluntly, speaking through a Spanish interpreter. But after marching with Jews on Sunday afternoon, praying with them in her church and hearing their shouts of solidarity with her plight, Lopez changed her mind. “I could see and feel they were different,” she said. “I really appreciated them. It was like an injection of adrenaline.” That’s why 22-year-old Tamar Pentelnick came on one of the buses from Minneapolis. “As Jews, hearing that other Jews treat people like this, I wanted to show that not all Jews are like this, that we care about others and human rights are important to us,” she said. The interfaith service, march and rally represented the largest and most public demonstration of Jewish support for those affected by the massive raid two months ago by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Police estimated the crowd at more than 900. Agriprocessors first gained national attention in 2000 with the publication of the book "Postville," which described the tensions between the the local community and the company, owned by Lubavitcher Chasidim from Brooklyn. Since then, Agriprocessors has come under fire over its slaughter methods and labor practices, as well as health and safety violations. The May 12 raid added new layers to the controversy, with federal authorities coming under criticism, the plant's former workers facing economic problems and the company scrambling to keep up production. Through it all, the company has denied any wrongdoing and vehemently rejects the claim that it does not look out for its workers. Sunday's events -- spearheaded by the Minnesota-based Jewish Community Action and the Chicago-based Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and supported by a number of other groups including the Jewish Labor Committee and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society -- focused on the affected workers and their families as a way of generating support for the larger goal of comprehensive, national immigration reform. “The Agriprocessors raid is the legacy of a failed immigration system,” said Gideon Aronoff, the president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Aronoff told the crowd that immigration reform is something “that matters” to the Jewish community. “Instead of a national solution to a national problem, we have a mishmash of local responses, a border fence that doesn’t work and millions of dollars spent chasing down immigrant workers,” he said. Athough virtually all the workers arrested in the Postville raid were from Mexico and Guatemala, the Jews who participated in the rally say this is a very Jewish issue. Text study and discussions of immigration policy were held on the buses coming in from Minneapolis and Chicago, emphasizing the Jewish values and teachings that informed the rally’s organization. “We’re here because we care,” said Rabbi Harold Kravitz of Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minneapolis. Working conditions are no better in many other industrial plants, he noted, but the fact that Agriprocessors is Jewish owned and produces kosher meat gives the case particular urgency to some Jewish activists. “We’re here as Jews because we believe kosher means we must answer to a higher authority,” Kravitz said. “We think a Jewish voice is critical,” added Vic Rosenthal, the executive director of Jewish Community Action. “Who else should be speaking up for workers' rights, especially when it involves kosher food?” Jonathan Ribnick, 15, was on one of two busloads of teens from Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. On one hand, Ribnick was upset that the allegations of worker mistreatment by Agriprocessors and its Jewish owners are giving Jews a bad name, fanning the flames of anti-Semitism and “messing it up for the rest of us,” as he put it. “But we’re not here because we want kosher meat,” he said. “We’re here for the people. We care how people are being treated.” Abby Seeskin, 20, a student at Macalester College in St. Paul, had been to a few rallies for immigrant rights, but this was the first time she went as part of a Jewish group. “It’s important not just because it’s a kosher plant but because although I’m not particularly religious, the Jewish values I grew up with influence my outlook in life and have informed my interest in immigration issues,” she explained. “The idea of tikkun olam" -- reparing the world -- "is very important to me, probably more than any other Jewish value.” The issue of caring came up repeatedly throughout the day. Agriprocessor owners take issue with the claims that they, by contrast, don’t care. Aaron Rubashkin, who founded the company two decades ago, in a prepared statement said he and his family were immigrants themselves, escaping first Soviet and then Polish communism to find “freedom and opportunity” in America. The company has helped workers hurt by the raid, said spokesman Chaim Abrahams, providing food and subsidizing rent by allowing them to stay in Rubashkin-owned properties even when they are not up to date on payments. No workers interviewed were aware of rent subsidies, although some said that company trucks handed out boxes of meat, chicken and sausages in their neighborhoods last week. Earlier Sunday, Abrahams met with leaders of the Catholic and Jewish activist groups to address their major concerns, including help for the affected workers and back pay for those arrested. Talks should continue next week, participants reported. For more than an hour, the blocks-long march snaked its way through town, past the front gates of Agriprocessors and a playground eerily empty of children. In some classrooms, locals report, more than half the students disappeared overnight. Young Jewish activists used megaphones to lead the crowd in Spanish-language chants: “Nosotros todos immigrantes” -- “We are all immigrants.” They were answered by Guatemalans wearing traditional woven shirts and young mothers with electronic ankle bracelets wheeling babies in strollers, American flags flying from the handles. Longtime Postville resident Norma Schlee watched it all from her front lawn. “I think it’s magnificent that they were able to come from all over,” she said. And as for the Jews coming in from out of state to show their support for this tiny Iowa town ripped apart by the raid and its aftermath, Schlee nodded her head in approval, saying, “I think that’s very important.”
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest"These are simple people. They are a family of butchers," said Dovid Eliezrie, a California rabbi who has been assisting the family with the media.
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