Marching With the Faithful in Iowa

By Micah Maidenberg - Jewish Daily Forward
Friday, August 01, 2008 - Web Link
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July 31, 2008

Inside St. Bridget’s church, the conversations I heard moved between English and Spanish, and the prayers switched between Christian and Jewish. Outside, young girls from Guatemala and Mexico mingled with graying Jewish activists from Minnesota and Chicago. This was all part of a warm-up for a very unusual march.

The crowds had come here for an afternoon protest march that led them to the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse — the kosher plant that was the subject of a federal immigration raid in May in which nearly 400 workers were arrested. In addition to the people who had come to support the immigrants, a smaller contingent was in town to tell the immigrants to go home. Then there were the Postville locals, some of whom set up chairs along the route of the one-and-a-half mile-long march.

Postville has hosted such festivals as Dairy Days and the Taste of Postville — and it has gotten used to diversity after years of hosting a slaughterhouse that brought Hasidic Jews and workers from Eastern Europe and Central America to this rural corner of northeastern Iowa. But Sharon Drahn, editor of the Postville Herald-Leader, said that Sunday’s march was unprecedented.

“It was the first time ever we had a march/rally/walk. But I thought they did a good job,” Drahn said of the organizers.

My own trip to Postville began at 7 a.m., when two buses pulled out from Beth Emet synagogue in suburban Chicago. After a rest stop in Wisconsin, Royal Berg, a Chicago immigration lawyer, and Sister Pat Murphy, a Chicago nun, talked about the plight of illegal immigrants and made the case for comprehensive reform of the immigration system.

Soon after crossing the Mississippi River, the buses arrived in town. Postville bore a striking resemblance to my own hometown in Indiana, with its tidy green lawns and ranch houses spread around a small brick downtown. My patch of the Midwest, though, never had a Judaica shop or a store catering to Guatemalans.