A model of joyful Jewish life, faith and authentic brotherly love.
Avraham Aharon Rubashkin was from Nevel—that legendary Chassidic White Russian town—just like his parents and their parents before them.
It was as a boy in Nevel that, in 1938, the Soviets forcibly closed down his cheder. From there he fled, together with his family, amid Nazi bombs and roadside strafing, surviving the war thousands of miles away. He escaped the Soviet Union in 1946, never to return. In the early 1950s, Rubashkin arrived in New York City, opening a modest kosher butchery in Brooklyn that would eventually grow into the world’s largest kosher meat and poultry slaughterhouse and supplier and with which his name would become synonymous.
Yet it was to Nevel that Rubashkin—who passed away on April 2 at age 92 from complications due to COVID-19—always returned, the town of his youth forever remaining a byword for vivid, joyful Jewish life and authentic brotherly love.
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