Postville reacts to Sholom Rubashkin's release: Some dance, some still angry

POSTVILLE, Ia. — A spontaneous dance party erupted Wednesday night here where the welcome signs tout the community as “hometown to the world.”

Postville's Jews flocked to the synagogue in the wake of news that Sholom Rubashkin, former owner of the local meatpacking plant who was imprisoned after a 2008 immigration raid at his kosher food processor, had been released by President Donald Trump.

People and cars spilled onto the streets.

In the wake of declaring that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital, and on the final night of Hanukkah, Trump commuted Rubashkin’s 27-year sentence.

The news quickly rippled from Washington, D.C., to Orthodox Jewish communities in New York — and to this remote northeast Iowa town of 2,100.

Aaron Goldsmith, whose Transfer Master Products manufactures custom hospital beds, joined the celebration. He’s a lifelong friend of Rubashkin’s.

Their children grew up together in Monsey, N.Y., where Goldsmith plans to return in several weeks to reunite with Rubashkin and attend his own grandson’s bar mitzvah.

"This was a victory," Goldsmith said, "for any person who was besieged by the government."

Like many supporters who had grown more prominent and vocal in the last eight years that Rubashkin was behind bars, Goldsmith spoke of the “tremendous excess” of his friend's sentence and the “thread of sadness” it represented.

“The only thing he didn’t lose,” Goldsmith said, “was his dignity.”

The Rubashkin case with its belated resolution has been part of the broader narrative of what Goldsmith called Postville’s “very big highs and lows.”

This town has been both a paragon of surprising rural diversity and a cautionary tale of what can befall vulnerable new immigrants struggling to gain a foothold.

'We all have the shared trauma'

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on May 12, 2008, was, at that time, the largest ever staged.

Agents swept up 389 workers and herded them into the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo. About one-fourth of the town disappeared in an instant.

Jerry Moncada was a sixth-grader in the middle of class when he heard the muffled thump-thump-thump of black helicopters swoop down. He couldn’t help but be scared.

His parents, originally from Mexico, moved to Postville in 2003 and still run the family business, La Canasta Supermarket. Their clientele has grown only more diverse through the years, as they sell fresh fruit to Guatemalan and Somali immigrants alike.

Moncada stood behind the counter Thursday in an Iowa Hawkeyes stocking hat. He’s helping out over winter break and is set to graduate in May from the University of Iowa with a degree in exercise physiology.

The raid “still does kind of make me angry,” he said.

Rubashkin ultimately was convicted on 86 of 91 counts of financial fraud tied to Agriprocessors. But government prosecutors dropped the immigration charges against him, electing not to pursue a second trial for a man, now 57, who already was scheduled to be locked up until 2033.

That meant Postville’s Mexican and Guatemalan immigrant workers never really got their day in court to fully describe conditions at the plant that included alleged sexual exploitation of young women.

University of Michigan researchers recently found that in the months after the raid, local Latina mothers suffered birth weights lower than at any other time within the decade surrounding it.

As Moncada put it on behalf of his town: “We all have the shared trauma.”

Unease over the government

The Rubashkin commutation was on the lips of many Postville residents, although word hadn’t spread as fast outside the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish community.

Postville's downtown light poles are festooned with both menorahs and Christmas wreaths.

The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) streamed through town in July. Rabbis blessed Jewish bikers alongside Somalis selling piping hot beef pastries.

On Thursday, some preparing for Santa wondered why TV news trucks were roaming the streets. Others who had heard the news considered justice more or less rendered with Rubashkin’s time already served.

In a tearful statement at his April 2010 sentencing in Cedar Rapids, a shackled Rubashkin told the courtroom that he should have followed his dream to become a teacher.

“I’m conflicted that I allowed myself to be drafted into the family business,” he said that day.

Rubashkin’s father emigrated to the U.S. from Israel in 1952. The family purchased the Postville meatpacking plant in 1987.

As Moncada heard the helicopters from his classroom in 2008, Tzvi Bass was a kosher supervisor, one of Rubashkin's employees inside Agriprocessors who stood in the thick of the chaos.

Today, he runs the kosher grocery Glatt Market. His longtime cashier from Ukraine, Nadia Babiy, was working Wednesday night when "people start to come shop, make a party" over the Rubashkin release.

Bass, 33, added to the chorus calling Rubashkin’s sentence “not fair compared to what he did.”

Rubashkin's supporters alleged that the government interfered in the Agriprocessors bankruptcy sale.

Op-eds in national newspapers with a long, influential list of signatories clamored for President Barack Obama to commute Rubashkin’s sentence before leaving office.

Judge Linda Reade was pilloried throughout Rubashkin's appeals and in a story earlier this year that explored her husband's investments in private prisons that housed undocumented immigrants.

Rubashkin was acquitted in a state case that alleged dozens of misdemeanor violations of child labor law. Yet even Goldsmith acknowledged that “there could’ve been misgivings, there could’ve been laws broken” at Agriprocessors.

But the Rubashkin case became such a rallying cry not only for Jews but among a bipartisan coalition of politicians and officials, he said, because it fed on some of the same discontent that served as a backdrop to the 2016 election.

"There's a sense in this country," Goldsmith said, "when the government wants to get you, you have no hope.”

I also spoke to Latinos in Postville who still were trying to come to grips with the Rubashkin news — particularly at the hands of a president who has bragged of building a wall on the Mexican border, threatened to end DACA and handed down a full pardon to immigration hardliner and former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Many in Postville share an unease over what seems like the fickle way in which the government can wield its power. But that uneasiness takes on forms as different and varied as the people themselves.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).