Attorneys for a former vice president of an Iowa kosher meatpacking plant have appealed his conviction and sentence on financial fraud charges.
Attorneys for Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin filed their appeal Friday with the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
Rubashkin was found guilty last fall on 86 federal financial fraud charges. He was sentenced last month to 27 years in prison and ordered to pay $27 million in restitution.
His attorney, Guy Cook, says evidence not related to the charges was allowed at trial and that the sentence is unjust and amounts to a life sentence for the 51-year-old Rubashkin.
Rubashkin was indicted following a 2008 raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville where 389 illegal immigrants were detained.
In other news, here is what Alan Jay Gerber wrote in the “Kosher Bookworm” section of The Jewish Star newspaper:
With the recent verdict in the Rubashkin case, trials are yet again big news among Jews. However, trials are nothing new nor unique in the annals of our history and the miscarriages of justice is a repeating motif for us. Rubashkin’s case serves for us today as an opportunity to look back in time and to learn from the not-to-distant past what an unjust act by state power can mean to a community.
Recently, a new biography appeared by Ruth Harris, entitled, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Metropolitan Books 2010). The work deals with one of the most egregious examples of state-sponsored criminal behavior cloaked in the righteous garb of the judicial system.
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was the only Jew on the general staff of the French military. Given the anti-Semitic tenor of that era, he was subject to a false charge of treason. The resulting trial unleashed a torrent of bigotry that haunted French society and French history for the next century.
Harris’ extensively researched volume goes a long way to demonstrate the depth of hatred that enveloped the French military establishment to its core. The accomplices to the false accusation leveled at Dreyfus included many distinguished members of the press, the intellectuals, and major sectors of the political establishment.
Previous biographies have played down Dreyfus’s Jewish identity and for the past century this impression was given almost divine sanction. While no great religiously devout Jew, Harris brings out that both Dreyfus and family were indeed proud of their faith and never denied their adherence to it.
Consider the following: “On 30 December 1894 – only days after Alfred’s conviction – she [his wife] went with the Dreyfus clan to the synagogue on the first anniversary, or Yahrtzeit, of Alfred’s father’s death and recited the Kaddish, the prayer of mourning for their lost father. Their sense of loss was expressed in Jewish terms. Dreyfus himself admitted in a letter to Lucie that he wept without restraint in thinking about it. The family’s private culture was still marked by Jewish practice, no matter how attenuated.”
This Jewish religious factor runs throughout this well-written book and gives the whole tragedy of the Dreyfus Affair a legitimate page in the annals of Jewish history.
The horrid events of the Dreyfus Affair were also witnessed by an assimilated Austrian Jewish journalist, Theodore Herzl, and became the inspiration for his founding the World Zionist Organization, an act that led directly to the founding of the State of Israel.
Thus we see that the lessons of our history serve to teach us that events do not occur by accident. While not understood nor appreciated in the immediacy of time, events do have consequences.
The Dreyfus Affair happened upon the cusp of the 20th century. In retrospect, the event served as a harbinger for what was to play out 40 years later: the near total destruction of the Jewish population on the European continent.
What the Rubashkin verdict will mean to us has yet to play out in the days ahead. Is there a thematic link between Dreyfus and Rubashkin? I do not know for certain. There are qualitative differences in the crimes alleged and in the sociological dynamics at work that we must remember. However, my dear readers, consider this: the very day the verdict in the Rubashkin case was handed down was the very day of Alfred Dreyfus’s 75th Yahrtzeit.
It maybe I’m missing some Saichel . Mdarf zein forzichdik when making such inaccurate statements. it can come back in your face.
Looking at the whole affair honestly the govt. should repay the bank or the bank should sue the govt.
Check out what Thomas Jefferson said about a periodic revolution in America to stop govt. corruption.
Now’s the time?
The Hebrew date depends on whether it was night or day. Are you sure of your facts?
Yeah but it makes my post sound more dramatic if i say Mashioch comes last because its like,
1) So and so happens
2)so and so happens
3) MASHIACH COMESSS!!!!
Get it? No? ya?
Your missing some seichel- common sense.
It’s not always necessary to poke and find mistakes and if you do it’s definitely not appropriate to point them out in this situation.
I have no doubt Sholom Mordechai will be freed very soon, I watched him growing up when he and his brothers would walk over from BoroPark every Shaboss regardless of the weather heavy winter or hot summers to the Rebbes farbrengens when he wasnt even barmitsvah yet.
All klal yisroel are davening for you and will rejoice together when you are freed iy”h very soon.
i thought my country believes in right lol
1)Mashiach will come
then the other two will for sure happen
this continues the anti semitic pollard miscarrige of justice
A. Dreyfus died on July 12, 1935 according to chabad.org it was 11 Tammuz. The sentence was handed down on the 10th of Tammuz ? Am I missing something ? still very close…
An end to this horrible nightmare. May all the evil plotters faze out like dust and may all the terrorists be taught a lesson.
May G-d be with them and reverse the evil doings of this machshefa
I learnt about dreyfus this year, and his innocense was soon revealed and he was completely given back his stuture and everything he left behind. It’s spooky, but may rubashkins case end as well as that one did!
1) Rubashkin be free.
2) That horrible “linda reade bla bla bla” dies but suffers!
3) Mashiach comes.
I hope Sholom Mordechai gets out very soon, and that sick, bigoted, monster of a woman dies with a Misah Meshuneh.
Let’s keep davening and doing mitzvos bizchuso
dear sholem mordchai i we and all of us are waiting and doing things better in your zchus ,and teikef umiad miyad mamesh should we have reall good news ,zaigezunt un shtark