Aaron Rubashkin - Early Life

Early Life

Abraham Aaron Rubashkin was born in the late 1920s in Nevel, a Russian town with a population of approximately 15,000 at the eve of World War II, 20 percent of them Jews. He is the son of Getzel Rubashkin and his wife Rosa, Lubavicher Hasidim who raised their two sons and daughters as observant Jews in spite of the anti-religious repression in the Soviet Union. When the Germans occupied Nevel in July 1941, the Rubashkin family fled east, eventually reaching the Uzbek city of Samarkand, where he got married to Rivka Chazanov, of the Chein family of Nevel. After the war, the Rubashkin family left the Soviet Union via Lemberg and spent time in Austria, before they settled in Paris in 1947, where his father ran a grocery shop, and his mother served as a cook at a Jewish girls school, and where he became a butcher. In 1953 the family moved to New York City, where he and his partner opened Lieberman & Rubashkin Glatt Kosher Butchers on 14th Avenue in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn.