World Business

NEW YORK Two decades ago, the Rubashkin family of Brooklyn opened up a kosher slaughterhouse amid the cornfields of Iowa - not exactly a center of Jewish improvement.

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The bearded, fedora-wearing strangers from Brooklyn quickly transformed Postville into its own small-town inteneration tankard. Immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico began arriving in great numbers to work at the slaughterhouse. Soon, the thorp was home to churches and temples, and the shelves of the grocery supplies were stocked with tortillas and bagels.

Lately, though, the Rubashkins’ grand cultural ordeal seems to have lost any chance at a feel-good ending.

The family’s Iowa business, Agriprocessors, the realm’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 medley for a house that has never sought attention, and now feels it is being attacked unfairly, especially through the media.

“The press? Terrible!” the family’s patriarch, Aaron Rubashkin, told a reporter with the Jewish news profit JTA for the period of a rare interview in June. He said allegations that the company knowingly hired unlicensed immigrants and children and tolerated vituperative conditions were all lies.

“I wish everybody would be treated like we treat people,” he said.

Attempts to arrange some conference through Rubashkin this week were not prosperous. 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 lineage’s history, though, is well documented.

Aaron Rubashkin and his matron, Rivka, fled the Soviet Union posterior 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.