Eight years later, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin’s personal Chanukah miracle is still lighting up the darkest nights

Photos: Ariel Ochanah, Mishpacha archives

IF you’re an adult today, you surely remember the night at the end of Chanukah 2017 when Rabbi Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin was astoundingly released from prison, after serving eight years of a whopping 27-year sentence. But who would have imagined that eight years after that personal miracle, he’d become the emunah and bitachon rebbe of the entire Jewish world?

After emerging not only with his own unshakable faith strengthened even more, but as a universal beacon of hope and trust even as he was held in what he famously termed “a place called prison,” Sholom Mordechai ben Rivkah, the name on the lips of myriad Yidden who prayed for his salvation daily, has become a magnet for so many others — people who feel broken, conflicted, struggling with painful challenges where it feels like there’s no way out.

So much so that he and his wife, Leah — who has been an international fount of inspiration on her own since the family’s legal saga began back in 2009 — and some of their enterprising children, have created a veritable “campus of emunah” in Jackson, New Jersey, where every Shabbos, and every day throughout the week, masses of people flock in order to be inspired, to learn, to latch onto the emunah embedded inside the neshamah of every single Jew, even though it’s often covered by layers of challenges, ego, and the temptations and illusions of the physical world.

“It’s not really about us,” Leah Rubashkin says, deflecting any personal credit. “Hashem is pushing us along, Klal Yisrael is pushing us along.”

But how did it happen? Two decades ago, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, who’d created a flourishing kehillah in Postville, Iowa, where he was vice president of Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the US, was known as a larger-than-life baal chesed, someone everyone turned to, even his hundreds of non-Jewish employees. But how did he evolve from that into one of the biggest spiritual mashpiim on the Jewish landscape?