For decades on 13th Avenue in Boro Park, a deli sat beneath a neon sign shaped like a crown that never quite lit up. The food was good, but that was rarely the point. The woman behind the counter fed everyone who walked in, whether they could pay the bill or not. That was Mrs. Rivka Rubashkin a”h, and for two generations of Boro Parkers, a meal at Crown’s Deli was as much about her as it was about the food.
Mrs. Rubashkin a”h, matriarch of the Rubashkin family, was niftar late Sunday. She was in her late 90s.
She was the wife of Reb Avraham Aaron Rubashkin OBM, the kosher meat pioneer and patriarch of a large Lubavitch family, who passed away in 2020. While his name became synonymous with an industry he helped transform, hers became attached to something quieter and harder to measure: a home, and a table, that no one was ever turned away from.
Crown’s was the most public expression of that. She ran the restaurant at 4909 13th Avenue from its founding in 1960 , and for the half-century it operated, neighbors understood it less as a business than as a place of chessed. It had the reputation of a soup kitchen as much as a deli, with Mrs. Rubashkin feeding anyone who was hungry for free. It never turned a profit, and was never meant to. Longtime customers still speak of her cooking by name: a cabbage strudel she was known for, potato and kasha knishes, an apple strudel . Some families made a yearly trip on the night of Bedikas Chometz, not only for supper but to bring their children over for a bracha from Mrs. Rubashkin.
The same spirit defined her home. The Rubashkins had settled in Boro Park after arriving in New York, and as her husband built the businesses that would reshape kosher food in America, she kept a house with an open door. Yeshiva bochurim, struggling families, newly arrived immigrants, and complete strangers found a meal, a bed, or simply the warmth of a Yiddishe home. Much of what she gave was given privately. Many who were helped never learned where the help had come from.
Her own story began far from Brooklyn. Born Rivka Chazanov of the Chein family of Nevel, she fled the town after the German occupation in July 1941 and made her way east, marrying R’ Avraham Aaron Rubashkin in the Uzbek city of Samarkand. After the war the family left the Soviet Union by way of Lemberg, spent time in Austria, and settled in Paris in 1947. In 1953 they came to New York, where her husband and his partner R’ Alter Lieberman opened Lieberman & Rubashkin Glatt Kosher Butchers on 14th Avenue, the shop later known simply as Rubashkin’s.
Over the years she and her husband supported a wide range of Jewish and communal causes, and quietly carried families in need, yeshiva students, and widows. The home they built was rooted in Torah and Chassidus, and its generosity reached well beyond the people they knew by name.
Mrs. Rubashkin is survived by her children, Mrs. Gitel Goldman of Miami Beach, FL; Mrs. Sara Balkany of Boro Park; Mrs. Rochel Leah Rosenfeld of Tzfas; R’ Yossi Rubashkin of Crown Heights; R’ Moshe Rubashkin of Crown Heights; R’ Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin of Jackson, NJ; Mrs. Chayala Gourarie of Crown Heights; R’ Heshy Rubashkin of Postville, IA; and Mrs. Chana Zelda Minkowicz of Crown Heights, along with grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. She is also survived by her siblings, Meir Simcha Chazanow and Rochel Leah Dagan, and was predeceased by her siblings Basya Kalmenson and Miriam Chazanow.
The levaya will take place today, Monday. The procession will pass her home at 5500 15th Avenue in Boro Park at 12:15 PM, reach 770 Eastern Parkway at 2:15 PM, and arrive near the Ohel at 3:30 PM.
Baruch Dayan Ha’Emes.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
The obituary comments written above about the נפטרת ע”ה are very accurate. She will certainly be greeted in Shomayim with a greeting of מלאכי השרת no smaller than the greeting in front of her home on the evening Reb Shalom Mortcha was freed and came to visit his parents.