"We’re going to stay strong and connected to Hashem. This is a nisayon, but we will do this”

"There were multiple times our world was shattered,” says Roza Hindy Weiss, as she looks back at the landscape of their ordeal. “It was always, Okay, this has to be the worst it gets, but then, many times, it just got worse. My father’s arrest was one of the darkest times.”

The saga began 12 years prior to Rabbi Rubashkin’s arrest following a massive immigration department raid on the family’s meat processing plant, Agriprocessors. When Roza Hindy, the oldest of the ten Rubashkin children, was just bas mitzvah, her family moved to the Midwest to join the family business.

“That first year,” Roza Hindy recalls, “our community wasn’t just small, but tiny. My brothers and I were the only students in our new school, and were joined by a handful of friends a few months in. Five years later, I graduated 12th grade with four other classmates.

“Yet I had an incredibly healthy and wholesome childhood. Every Yom Tov was an opportunity to celebrate life and spread sparks of Yiddishkeit within our modern-day shtetl. On Purim, everyone got a package, and Simchas Torah was filled with pure excitement and joy.

“Financially, my parents were people of means, but gashmiyus wasn’t the agenda, only serving Hashem and His Torah. Our parents taught us that Hashem has empowered us to make this world His home, that each of us had a specific mission in this world that no one else could do.

“When my father was in jail, I kept having this vision of the shtetl, of a brand-new community, I’d recreate alongside my father when he came out. ‘Roza Hindy’s shtetl dream’ became a joke among my siblings. But I so longed for my kids to have the same childhood gift I was given.”

Searching for Support

Far from her parents’ home in Postville, Iowa, Roza Hindy was living in upstate New York and had just had her third child, when she heard the devastating news of her father’s arrest.

“I called my mother, who was home with my siblings, and told her, ‘I’m coming right now.’ I so badly wanted to be there.

“But she said, ‘Actually we need your help in other ways. We need to put money together — a lot of it, and fast.’”

The authorities had frozen most of the business accounts, a tactic they use to cripple people so they don’t have funds to defend themselves properly. Whatever money was left had been used to try and keep the business afloat — it had been left in chaos, with most of the staff forcibly dismissed.

“I remember having to sit down and literally process what she told me. I’d grown up in a family of baalei tzedakah, in a family who believed that money was there to share, and all of a sudden, the tables were turning. I had no idea where to start raising money.”

Thrust into an unknown world — and into a role that was a cross between financial advocate and the family’s point person for all things legal — Roza Hindy figured she’d start with the closest community, Monsey.

“My brother had a friend, a bochur who was from Monsey. I called him and said, ‘Listen, we need money to hire a lawyer for our father to fight for bail.’ And that’s how we began. My husband and I, sometimes with our kids in tow, went from door to door, repeating the same story, the same details.

“In those early days, few people knew what was going on. It was a foreign story to most — and utterly humiliating. There were some really tough meetings. People couldn’t grasp it: you have a multi-million-dollar company and you’re collecting money? But I knew my father’s life depended on it, so I ignored the pit in my stomach each time, and forced myself onward.

“Today, it’s all about feelings, but for me, there was no other way. If I delved too much into what I was feeling, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.