The global Chabad community and Jewish philanthropic world are mourning the passing of Rebbetzin Rivka Rubashkin, matriarch of one of Brooklyn's most prominent Orthodox families and mother of Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, whose dramatic presidential commutation in 2017 became a rallying cry for Jewish unity worldwide. She died Sunday at her Boro Park home at age 90.
Rebbetzin Rubashkin's death marks the end of an era for a generation of European-born Holocaust survivors who rebuilt Jewish life in America through a combination of entrepreneurial vision and relentless charity. Together with her late husband, Rabbi Avraham Aharon Rubashkin — widely credited as a pioneer of the glatt kosher meat industry in the United States — she transformed their private residence on 55th Street in Boro Park into what community members described as a 24-hour hospitality center that never turned away a guest.
Born Rivka Chazonov in the Chabad stronghold of Nevel, Russia, she fled with her family during the Nazi invasion in July 1941, eventually reaching Samarkand, Uzbekistan, which became a wartime refuge for thousands of Hasidic Jews. After marrying Rabbi Rubashkin in the chaos of postwar displacement, the couple escaped Soviet territory through Lvov and spent years in Austrian refugee camps before settling briefly in Paris in 1947. They immigrated to New York in 1953, where Rabbi Rubashkin and his partner Alter Lieberman established the kosher butcher shop on 14th Avenue that would evolve into the Rubashkin meat empire.
