RSSImmigration raid pulls apart Iowa community
Carolyn Hileman - The Voice | July 5, 2008
POSTVILLE, Iowa — There is a small-town stillness here, neat houses and kids riding bicycles down quiet, leafy streets. But in the Guatemalan bakery, in church pews, at the meatpacking plant and the kosher deli, the strained voices almost always dwell on the raid that changed everything.
The stillness is not serenity. It’s shock.
Scores of heavily armed federal agents last month stormed into Agriprocessors, which produces up to 70 percent of all kosher meat in America. The feds seized almost half of the plant’s 900 workers in the largest single roundup of illegal immigrants to date, charging about 300 of them with identity theft and using stolen Social Security cards.
Some of those workers have since sued the company, alleging abuse, fraud and sexual coercion.
Postville, which once sold T-shirts boasting of the peaceful coexistence of its many cultures, has been left “absolutely shattered,” said the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk of the town’s St. Bridget’s Catholic Church.
The impact of the raid is spreading from northern Iowa across the country, provoking debate among American Jews about whether it’s time to reassess how kosher food is produced.
“Our reputation is at stake,” said Rabbi Morris Allen of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, Minn. “It was embarrassing for us to hear what was being done in order to process kosher food.”
The Rubashkin family, widely credited with inventing the modern kosher processing plant, opened Agriprocessors in 1987, cutting costs by “bringing the butcher to the livestock” in Iowa.
Abe Bistritzky, a Rubashkin family friend and spokesman, said the illegal workers used fake documents, and the company followed the law in verifying paperwork. Most of the workers were happy to have the jobs and were paid and treated fairly, he added.
He said the Rubashkins built a Jewish community and gave charity to the greater community.
“They’re not prejudiced. They’ll hire any kind of person, anyone who will walk through the door,” Bistritzky said. “What happened was when (Jews) came to town, they looked at us like we’re Martians. … They didn’t understand the black coats, the white shirts, the beards, the black hats, and they needed to learn about us.”
The sight of Hasidic Jews wandering the streets of a small town in Iowa initially seemed quaint. But the insular nature of their Lubavitch sect created distrust in the community, exacerbated when the Rubashkins started importing workers of many nationalities, especially Hispanics, as their plant expanded.
In 2000, Stephen Bloom wrote a book, “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America,” detailing the community’s conflicts and compromises since the arrival of Agriprocessors. He clearly indicated many of its workers were illegal. Ouderkirk now calls the book “prophetic.”
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