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On May 12, 2008, government agents raided a massive kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa. Within days, over 300 undocumented workers at the plant had been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by deportation. One of the plant’s managers, Sholom Rubashkin, was eventually sentenced to 27 years in prison for financial fraud. But in December…
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POSTVILLE, Iowa (JTA) – On a frigid evening late last month, Aron Schimmel, the Chabad emissary here, sat in a deli at the back of the glatt kosher supermarket sipping from a can of Israeli mango juice. A sign posted next to the entranceway boasted of the presence of Jewish life in this working-class town…
(JTA) – When Orthodox Jewish billionaire Hershey Friedman bought America’s largest kosher meat company, Agriprocessors, out of bankruptcy in 2009, it was the Canadian packaging magnate’s first foray into the meat business. Getting things in order was no easy task. The year before, federal authorities carried out the largest-ever U.S. workplace raid at Agriprocessors’ plant…
Fire damaged the first floor of the former site of the Agriprocessors kosher meat processing plant in Iowa. The late Friday night fire at Agri Star Meat & Poultry in Postville started in a dryer that was left on in the plant’s laundry room, according to reports, and has been classified as accidental. No one…
A federal judge reprimanded an attorney working on behalf of jailed former Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin. In a meeting Tuesday, U.S. District Chief Judge Linda Reade told the attorney that interviews of jurors in Rubashkin’s 2009 trial on bank fraud charges cannot be used for future appeals or other court proceedings, according to The Gazette,…
Abdikani Hassan, 29, a worker at Agri Star kosher slaughterhouse, was reportedly stabbed by another worker John Herrera, 23, during a brawl last night that involved 15 people. The stabbing occurred inside the refrigerator of Agri Star — the kosher slaughterhouse and meat processing plant that formerly housed Agriprocessors, which went into bankruptcy after a…
Five years ago, what was considered the largest immigration raid in American history trained a harsh spotlight on abusive conditions for workers and animals at the nation’s biggest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant. The raid on Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, and the subsequent conviction of its owner on federal financial fraud brought more than…
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