"Postville Iowa go figure" Iowa by Ekahau

Iowa Travel Guide: 1,020 reviews and 2,349 photos

Postville who would figure ---I was driving through a very small town today (I like to do that) and thought --hay there are some Amish but when I got closer I noticed that it was a group of Lubavitchwer Jews mixed with Mexicans. In Iowa? 50 Miles away from the closes McDonalds? For 150 years, Postville was all white, all Christian, all Norman Rockwell, an everyone-knows-everyone, live-and-die-here kind of town run by farmers of Norwegian stock. Used to be if you wanted a quickie breakfast in this small town, your choices were pretty much limited to doughnuts: one with sticky pink frosting or one smeared with gooey chocolate. Now you can get a kosher blueberry bagel. Or a loaf of dense, tangy Russian bread. Or even a Mexican pastry. Then, about twelve years ago I learn that, an ultra-Orthodox Jew bought a boarded-up meatpacking plant on the edge of town and converted it into a kosher slaughterhouse. Word soon got out that Postville had jobs. Lots of jobs "Mexican Jobs". I asked Aaron one of the 40 Rabbis' who works at the slaughterhouse to supply fresh meat to his kosher stores in New York, why Postville? Aaron never explained why they settled on Postville. His son Shalom, who now helps run the plant, said only that "divine providence" must have guided him here.

Aaron said - three-dozen rabbis trained to kill livestock and inspect Kosher meat, plus friends and relatives to help came first. Then came the others. Mexican, Guatemalan, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Bosnian, Czech - dozens, then hundreds, of immigrants swarmed to jobs in the kosher slaughterhouse. To locals, it seemed an invasion. "It was a little scary at first," said Becky Meyer, a lifelong resident who sold me the kosher blueberry bagel. Amazing -- a bagel in Iowa "Many folks born and raised in Postville until recently had never met a black person, never met a Jew, never heard a foreign language except in school. "Working next to Becky in the small bakery/store/restaurant/social hall was a 17-year-old named Ilya from Kazakhstan and Susy the Mexican American wife of a meatpacker. There are so many immigrants from the former Soviet Union that the community store had signs posted in Russian - along with English, Hebrew and Spanish.

I found a posted newspaper article about a recent election " Voters streamed into the Citizen's Community Center all day, and by day's end, nearly 52 percent of the town's 1,047 registered voters cast ballots. Voters chose ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jew Aaron Goldsmith by a 325-to-216 margin."

I took lots of photos of the Mexicans in Iowa they were ever so Friendly and kind.

Last visit to Iowa: Sep 2001
Intro Written Sep 8, 2002
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Mexican community happy to... Local Customs (1)

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well Postvill is off the... Off The Beaten Path (1)

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Comments (6)

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Sue08080 Jun 15, 2006 at 3:27 AM

What is "bland Iowa" doing on this exotic map, I said to myself. What a surprise. Great story! Now I'll have to check out the rest of your pages.
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mtncorg Sep 17, 2003 at 1:51 PM

A story not unlike that of Oregon's Antelope, the town where the Rajneeshees set up shop for the old Baghwan. Ony they didn't get to keep their person in charge. Maybe interesting to see how the vote went;-/
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nepalgoods Aug 12, 2003 at 9:22 PM

Cute children! Great story!!!
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dinhyen Sep 26, 2002 at 12:50 PM

Amazing. Reads like something out of National Geographic :)
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meta4r Sep 8, 2001 at 11:06 PM

Very interesting look at Iowa.
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Petra1 Sep 3, 2001 at 6:24 AM

You took really beautiful children photos! Great page!