An Orthodox ‘We Are the World’ for Sholom Rubashkin
The latest effort to rally supporters for jailed Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin comes in the form of a six-minute music video posted online yesterday, featuring a who’s who of Hasidic music stars.
The video mixes slo-mo shots of Rubashkin with “We Are the World”-style clips of the all-male cast of singers in the recording studio.
Rubashkin is serving a 27-year sentence on bank fraud charges relating to his leadership of Agriprocessors. Immigration charges against Rubashkin have been dismissed, and he was acquitted of child labor charges.
The video features Lipa Schmeltzer, the Hasidic pop star whose Madison Square Garden concert was famously cancelled in 2008 in the face of rabbinic censure; Avrohom Fried, and Mordechai Ben David, among many others. The lyrics call for Rubashkin’s release. A sample, sung mostly by Schmeltzer:
Eagles soaring by
Could you lift him up with you now
And fly him home with justice pride and freedom?
His eyes are gazing wide from behind the bars he prays, now
With faith with joy,
oh how we wait to greet him.
The video asks viewers to donate to Rubashkin’s legal defense.
According to the clip’s website, www.UnityForJustice.com, the effort was sponsored by a firm called TelTech, which appears to make calling cards. The company has marketed a product called SpoofCard, which allows callers to change or hide their caller ID, and another called LoveDetect, which, according to a 2006 press release, allows callers “to determine their love interests’ true feelings.”
Check out the video here:
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO