The city of Postville, Iowa, has settled a lawsuit charging it with discrimination against an Orthodox Jewish landlord who housed undocumented workers employed by the former Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse. The city and several local officials have agreed to pay Gabay Menahem $450,000 and to hold a community workshop on diversity issues; however, they have not…
The new single and music video titled “The Japan Song,” released March 29 and featuring prominent Hasidic singers Avraham Fried and Shloimy Daskal, is not what you might expect. Although its purpose is fundraising for relief efforts, and the video includes some footage of the tsunami, it is not a fundraiser for Japan at all….
Three amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs have been filed in the past week in support of a motion to retry former Agriprocessors’ executive Sholom Rubashkin, according to Yated Ne’eman a weekly Haredi newspaper. The briefs were filed by the Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, The Washington Legal Foundation and National…
“Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority”, the new book by Sue Fishkoff, which came out last week, is the first comprehensive study of the Jews who produce, regulate, and consume an increasingly vast selection of manufactured and home-grown kosher foods. Fishkoff traces kashrut from its biblical origins…
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….
It was hard not to feel sympathy for Roza Hinda Weiss as she stood before some 700 Lubavitch women last Sunday night and asked them for money. At an “Emergency Rally for Pidyon Shvuyim,” or Redeeming a Captive, she was trying to raise $1.5 million for her father’s legal appeal. In November her father, Sholom…
A reader from suburban Chicago was mystified when he made a trip to the kosher aisle of his supermarket this last weekend. There, among the kosher soups and meats, he found packages of Agriprocessors’ turkey and corned beef, being sold under the Aaron’s Best label. The presence of these packages was a mystery because Agriprocessors…
An Iowa judge recently postponed one of the trials for top executives at the Agriprocessors kosher meat company. The executives were charged with nearly 10,000 separate child labor violations after the company was the subject of a massive immigration raid last May. This postponement means that the full story of the underage workers arrested during…
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