On a sultry July day nearly a decade ago, I stepped into a Catholic church in the Iowa hamlet of Postville to meet Irma Lopez. The mother of a 2-year-old daughter, she had been arrested along with her husband, Marcelo, several months earlier in a massive raid by federal immigration agents, aimed at the employees of a kosher slaughterhouse in town.
Now her husband was in a detention facility hundreds of miles away, awaiting deportation to Central America. Irma Lopez could remain in Postville only by wearing an ankle bracelet with a homing device as a form of house arrest.
There were so many mothers like her that they had their own name —persona con brazelet. Such was the human face of the social wreckage visited upon Postville by its would-be savior, an Orthodox Jewish executive and rabbi named Sholom Rubashkin. This same man, who was convicted of a $27 million fraud, sentenced to 27 years in prison and ordered to pay $18.5 million in restitution, recently had his term commuted by President Donald Trump.
Besides pandering once more to the Orthodox Jewish portion of his base, Trump acted as a result of a high-powered lobbying effort that included everyone from celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
There is an argument to be made that Rubashkin received an unduly severe sentence, two years longer than the prosecutor had sought and lengthier than the one meted out to Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron chief executive.
But at a moral level, the level that can fairly be applied in a case drenched in the supposed adherence to religious practice, never has so much bipartisan and interfaith influence been invested in such an undeserving individual. In the Hasidic, Yiddish-speaking milieu where Rubashkin was reared, there is a blunt term for such a man: gonif, crook.
One of the tragedies of Rubashkin’s fall and his unmerited rescue is that he could legitimately have played the hero. When his father, Aaron, first bought the former Hygrade meat-processing plant in Postville 30 years ago, the Rubashkin family had the opportunity to restore unionized, good-paying jobs to a portion of the hollowed-out heartland that direly needed them.
Instead, when the Rubashkins reopened the Hygrade plant under kosher auspices as Agriprocessors, they attracted and exploited a labor force of immigrants from the former Soviet empire, as Stephen Bloom recounts in his masterful book Postville. When those workers earned enough or wised up enough to leave, the Rubashkins began hiring hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan workers, many of them undocumented. In all respects, conditions worsened.
Rabbi Morris Allen, of the Conservative Jewish synagogue Beth Jacob in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul, recalled recently in the Forward what he saw on investigative visits to Postville:
“How well I remember the working conditions at Agriprocessors, where underage kids were working on the killing floor; where the local school bus made a stop at the plant to drop off young students who worked after the school day ended – often until 11 p.m.; where pregnant women were not allowed a bathroom break or time to visit their doctor; where safety equipment was lacking and where nearly the entire work force were undocumented workers easily exploited as they lived in fear of being turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
As a religion columnist then for The New York Times, I met Allen about a year before that raid. I wrote about his effort to bring Judaic ethics to the scandalous situation at Agriprocessors, and indeed to the entire kosher food industry.
Kosher meat receives its official certification, known as a hecksher, primarily on the basis of how the animal is treated — if there is or isn’t a blemish on the lung tissue, for example, or how the neck artery was sliced. Allen proposed that that certification should also be predicated on the fair treatment of the human beings doing that work. He called the program hecksher tzedek, using the Hebrew word for justice.
As it happens, I never wrote about Allen again in my column. But as I followed his valiant efforts to line up the Conservative Jewish movement behind hecksher tzedek, I paid close attention and began to count him as a friend.
So the journalist, friend and observant Jew in me have all been sickened by the disparity between the political and religious muscle wielded to get Rubashkin out of jail and the resounding lack of interest of virtually the entire Jewish community and its political leaders ever showed the campaign for hecksher tzedek. By now, Allen is retiring from his pulpit, and his admirable brainchild is effectively dead.
The Torah exhorts faithful Jews to love and help the stranger 36 times, more than any other commandment. Yet too many Jews have one set of ethics for their own kind and another for gentiles. Sholom Rubashkin ran his company on that principle, and his champions and enablers in the presidential commutation did the same. They cared a whole lot more about reuniting a criminal father with his 10 children than they did about all the families in Postville such as Irma Lopez’s who first got battered by exploitation and then broken by deportation.
Samuel G. Freedman, a professor at Columbia University and the author of eight books, is a regular contributor to