After nearly two decades, the Jews in Postville, Iowa, are beginning to blend into the fabric of small-town life.

Postville, Iowa, with its population of 2,300, is a cluster of storefronts and big wooden houses surrounded by farmland on all sides. Its very name has been the stuff of American Jewish legend since the late 1980’s, when a family of Lubavitch Hasidim opened a kosher meat plant in the town. It was Rubashkin’s father, Brooklyn butcher Aaron Rubashkin, who purchased a local slaughterhouse and transformed it into a company he named Agriprocessors. In 1989, Heshy and his wife, Basya, arrived to run the new family business. Their existence was lonely at first. The couple, then 24 and 19, moved into the Pines Motel and made frequent trips back to New York. Another Rubashkin brother, Sholom, and a brother-in-law, Yossi Gouarie, soon arrived to help—but instead of joining Heshy in Iowa, the two men commuted three hours from St. Paul, Minnesota, so their children could attend an Orthodox Jewish school.

When Chaim Aryeh reached school age, Basya began thinking seriously about returning to New York so he could have a proper Jewish education. “That started a panic in the family,” recalled Sholom’s wife, Leah. “Heshy was the only one living in Postville full time, the one who had been here from the beginning. Besides, everyone was getting tired of the commute. It was time to have a school of our own.”

The decision proved to be pivotal. Agriprocessors has since become the world’s largest glatt-kosher meat and poultry plant. Along the way, it has attracted over 500 employees, including some 50 Jewish men required for kashrut-related supervision. Every morning these Jewish workers, most of them Lubavitchers, arrive at an industrial building west of town marked by a large mounted menora. As truckloads of livestock pull in from nearby farms, they don white butchers’ smocks.

In a group where couples have numerous children (the two Rubashkin families currently have 16 between them), Jewish education is indispensable. Of the estimated 200 Jews in Postville, nearly half are schoolchildren. Chaim Aryeh’s recent bar mitzva marked a coming of age for the whole community.

“We now have Jewish children who have spent their whole lives in this town,” said Postville Mayor John Hyman. “Postville is their home. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s a positive thing.”

Hyman’s job grew even more colorful during the 1990’s when the plant began hiring Mexican and Ukrainian workers to perform production duties unrelated to the laws of kashrut. The small town became the subject of widespread publicity, including a PBS special and a controversial book by University of Iowa professor Stephen Bloom, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harvest/Harcourt). According to Bloom, the townspeople initially felt slighted when the newcomers refused to eat with their neighbors. The Jews, in turn, faced the challenge of raising observant children outside Chabad’s Crown Heights enclave. “Quite frankly, when people come from a large urban area to a rural community, it takes a few years to adjust,” Hyman admitted. “Living together has been a learning process on all sides.”

Today, Postville’s Jews are beginning to blend into the fabric of small-town life. A wooden “Worship in Postville” sign at the town’s entrance lists the Orthodox shul along with Lutheran, Catholic and Presbyterian churches. Many of the small country houses are decorated with Hebrew-lettered signs. Even the three-block business district reflects a Jewish presence, most notably a popular kosher deli called Jacob’s Table and a mattress company opened by Aaron Goldsmith, a Hasidic businessman who was the first Jewish resident to serve on Postville’s city council.

“Has the town changed?” asked Betty Hogan, 80, who moved there from Minnesota in 1954. “Oh, yes, heavenly days! But everyone’s gotten used to each by now. And if they haven’t, it’s their own fault.”

For a town that was almost homogeneously Lutheran for 100 years, finding a place for a traditional Chabad education posed a dilemma. The girls’ school, located in an old hospital building, offers religious studies in the morning and secular subjects in the afternoon. The corridors are decorated with Jewish themes, including a mural of the Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, while the desks are covered with suffix lists and multiplication tables.

Because many of the teachers are wives of Agriprocessors employees and are not board certified, and because the school requires the freedom to design its own curriculum, the girls’ school is officially considered part of the state’s Home School Assistance program. “That means we are expected to provide them with all their textbooks and materials, so long as they are not religiously based,” explained Postville school superintendent David Strudhoff. “We test them on a regular basis, but apart from that, they’re quite largely left alone.”

For a growing number of high school-level classes, the school is drawing on the skills of non-Jewish teachers. “I taught an English class to the Jewish girls,” said Kathy Turner, a tenth-grade English teacher at Postville’s public high school. Although Turner prides herself on exposing public school students to Judaism—she shows her sophomores The Diary of Anne Frank film each year—she found it challenging to work within the Jewish system. “The girls were certainly very intelligent,” she said, “[but] they just had very different ideas. They don’t do the dating and love thing before marriage, so they didn’t want me teaching Romeo and Juliet.”

For locals, the boys’ school is truly a world apart. Located in the white farmhouse that houses the shul, the yeshiva offers no secular studies whatsoever and is outside the domain of the Board of Education. Behind heavy wooden doors, teachers can be heard talking in loud, swift Yiddish. Young men gather around long tables in the sanctuary, debating the fine points of Gemara, reading silently or chanting Hebrew prayers. Along with Yiddish and Hebrew, the boys learn Aramaic, the language of the Talmud. The curriculum adheres so tightly to tradition that, if not for the Iowa scenery visible through every window, the boys could easily be studying in Brooklyn or a shtetl in eighteenth-century Poland.

The yeshiva does, in fact, import teachers from New York and Israel. “In a way, I love it here,” said the school’s director, Rabbi Aharon Cohen, a large twinkle-eyed Israeli with red hair and beard. The yeshiva has earned such a good reputation that, said Cohen, 23 of the 25 high school boys are boarding students from other parts of the United States.

Still, small boys in yarmulkes can be seen playing with tow-headed Christian children in Postville’s spacious backyards. Most of these interactions take place outside—Jewish parents worry that even the most well-intentioned neighbor might offer their children nonkosher food. Many also fear that encouraging contact with the non-Jewish world will raise difficult issues down the line, namely interest in movies, television, dating and other staples of adolescence. When students are taken for skating outings in nearby Decorah, the school minimizes exposure to local teenage culture by renting the entire roller rink. “We bring our own music for the girls, like Mordechai Ben David,” said Leah. “Lively music but—you know—Jewish.”

At Postville High School, an orange-brick building that proudly proclaims itself “Home of the Pirates,” local students say they have little interaction with their Hasidic peers. Kim Looney, an 18-year-old senior, said she had only interacted with the Hasidic girls while life-guarding at the local pool during the special Jewish women’s swim hour. Dimitriy Vanchugov, an 18-year-old whose non-Jewish parents came to work at Agriprocessors from Ukraine, added that the Hasidic men can be particularly inscrutable. “They separate themselves a lot, especially the rabbis,” he said. “They live in their own little world, and they don’t really let people in there. The Russian and Ukrainian people in Postville try to be part of the community. But the Jewish people just kind of keep to themselves.”

At least three Jewish families in the area send their children to public schools. Gerald Abrams—known within the Jewish community as Yosef—moved to the nearby town of Waukon, Iowa, in 1998. Although he and his wife, Bluma, originally came from Conservative backgrounds in the Chicago area, they grew intrigued by the town’s Orthodox community after a 1996 visit. In 1998, the couple left their respective jobs as an attorney and a medical technologist, purchased a dairy farm 16 miles from Postville and opened a kosher cheese company called Mitzvah Farms. Their company now ships to groceries as far away as New York, Texas and British Columbia. With product names like A Bisil Swiss’l and Muenster Mensch, and an answering machine greeting that promises to return messages “faster than fleas on a frying pan,” the couple has happily settled into the region’s unique brand of Judaism.

“I come from a big town and so does my husband,” said Bluma. “It’s wonderful that everyone here treats you like family. Religiously, they’re not critical of what you do or don’t do. They only hope you can maybe do a little bit more sometimes.” The couples call themselves “Friends of Chabad” and have become more observant. Yosef generally spends Friday nights and Saturdays with one of the many families in Postville so he can walk to Shabbat services. He and Bluma initially hoped that their sons—Micah, 17, and Jacob, 13—could study with the Jewish students in Postville, but lacking a yeshiva background they had difficulty following the classes.

“When our sons came to us with their homework,” Bluma explained, “they had no idea what the teacher had been saying in class. I told them, ‘I can’t help you—I don’t know Yiddish!’” The Abramses now send their children to Waukon public school and arrange for Jewish tutoring in the afternoons.

Two other Jewish families have enrolled their children in the local public school system. Brothers-in-law Mitchel Meltzer and Toby Bensasson moved to Postville from Florida when the Rubashkins hired them as full-time accountants. The two families are active in the local community and are appreciated for their strong support of sports programs and theatrical productions. Although they drive 90 minutes to attend a Conservative congregation in La Crosse, Wisconsin, they are well liked by the Lubavitchers. Meltzer’s wife, Elaine, teaches a course about Judaism at a nearby community college, and children from both families have Hasidic as well as Christian friends.

“I play basketball with Sholom Rubashkin’s sons whenever I can,” said Jordan Meltzer, a 15-year-old with a wild mop of dark curls. “And once in a while I’ll bind tefilin. It doesn’t make me feel anything special. But my Hasidic friends consider it a mitzva to get people like me to do it. So, whatever,” he said, shrugging. “If it weren’t for them, I don’t think the religion would continue. Like my dad says...they’re an anchor for it. I respect them for that.”

While the majority of the Hasidim have succeeded in raising observant children, few expect their sons and daughters to remain in town beyond the age of 16. Even with the growing number of Postville-born Jewish children, most families maintain a strong urban identity through frequent visits back home, and their sons and daughters feel at home in metropolitan areas. “I’m definitely a city girl,” said 10-year-old Rochel Goldsmith. She is already dreaming about moving to New York or Los Angeles as her two older brothers did before her.

Nobody at the kosher plant seems overly concerned by this trend. Some point out that the company’s widespread reputation continues to draw a constant stream of able-bodied Jewish men with small children. Others offer a more esoteric answer. “Do we have a plan?” asked Rabbi Aron Schimmel, an Agriprocessors employee from New York. “Yes, a big plan. Moshiah is going to come and then we won’t have to worry about anything.”

Whatever the next decades may bring, Postville continues to fascinate and lure young Jews. On one chilly day between seasons, several boarding students stood behind the yeshiva. The brown land was frozen, and flattened cornfields stretched toward a cloudy sky. “It’s so quiet here,” reflected Choli Mishulovin, a bespectacled 16-year-old with wispy forelocks. He left a religious Brooklyn neighborhood last August to spend a year in Postville. “In New York, there’s so much action in my head. When I’m here, I can focus on learning. There’s nothing to distract me.” He gazed across the vacant field into an expanse of white space. Then he opened the door, turning his thoughts back toward the world inside.

Jennie Rothenberg is a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly.