Rebbetzin Rivka Rubashkin, Mother of Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, Dies in New York

Rivka Rubashkin, a revered Chabad matriarch and the mother of the well-known prisoner Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, died in New York on Sunday, on Rosh Chodesh Tammuz, at the age of 98 or 99. She was one of the best-known and most beloved figures in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and news of her death brought mourning across the Jewish charitable world in New York, the United States and beyond.

She was the wife and longtime partner of Rabbi Avraham Aharon Rubashkin, who died in 2020 and is remembered as an early pioneer of kosher and glatt-kosher meat in America and a major philanthropist. Together they built a large enterprise centered on Torah, Chabad life and charity, and their home on 55th Street in Borough Park became a constant stop for rabbis, rebbes, yeshiva students, the poor and anyone in need of a warm welcome.

Born Rivka Chazanov in the Chabad town of Nevel, Russia, she fled with her family after the Nazi invasion in July 1941, reached Samarkand in Uzbekistan, then left the Soviet Union after the war, passed through Lemberg, lived in refugee camps in Austria and settled briefly in Paris in 1947 before emigrating permanently to New York in 1953. There, her husband and his partner Alter Liberman opened a kosher butcher shop on 14th Avenue in Borough Park, which grew into the Rubashkin meat empire that changed kosher food in America.

Rubashkin also ran the legendary Crown’s Deli on 13th Avenue from the early 1960s, and locals say it functioned as a hidden charity operation as much as a restaurant, feeding the hungry and the homeless even when they could not pay. The family also supported Torah institutions, immigrants from former Soviet states, widows, orphans and wedding expenses for needy families, often anonymously. She left behind many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren serving as Chabad emissaries, rabbis and community activists. The funeral is scheduled for Monday in New York, with stops outside her Borough Park home at 12:15 p.m., at Chabad headquarters at 770 in Crown Heights at 2:15 p.m., and burial at 3:30 p.m. near the Rebbe’s Ohel.