R' Avraham Aharon Rubashkin was born in western Russia in the 1920s, he 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 bomb and roadside strafing, surviving World War II 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.