NEW YORK – Two decades ago, the Rubashkin family of Brooklyn opened up a kosher slaughterhouse amid the cornfields of Iowa – not exactly a center of Jewish culture.

The strangers from Brooklyn quickly transformed Postville into a melting pot. Immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico began arriving in great numbers to work at the slaughterhouse. Soon, the town was home to churches and temples, and the shelves of the grocery stores were stocked with tortillas and bagels.

Lately, though, the Rubashkins’ grand cultural experiment seems to have lost any chance at a feel-good ending.

The family’s Iowa business, Agriprocessors, the nation’s biggest supplier of kosher meat, was raided by U.S. immigration agents in May. Nearly 400 workers, mostly Guatemalans, are likely to be deported as illegal immigrants.

Labor organizers and workers have also accused the company of exploiting its employees, tolerating abusive behavior by managers and illegally hiring teenagers to work on the factory floor.

A few Jewish groups question whether the troubled plant should keep its kosher certification.

It all adds up to a mess for a family that never sought attention, and now feels it is being attacked unfairly.

“The press? Terrible!” the family’s patriarch, Aaron Rubashkin, told a reporter with the Jewish news service JTA during a rare interview in June. He said allegations that the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants and children and tolerated abusive conditions were all lies.

“I wish everybody would be treated like we treat people,” he said.

Attempts to arrange an interview with Rubashkin this week were not successful. The family, however, is well documented.

Aaron Rubashkin and his wife, Rivka, fled the Soviet Union after World War II and settled in Brooklyn, a world center of Hasidic Judaism. In the 1950s, Aaron founded a kosher meat market in the city’s Borough Park section. The family prospered in America.

Then, in 1987, the Rubashkins bought an abandoned non-kosher meatpacking plant in tiny Postville, Iowa. The company was a huge success, with popular brands such as Aaron’s Best and Rubashkin’s. By 2006, Agriprocessors had a second plant in Nebraska and annual revenue of $250 million.

In 2004, the animal rights group PETA recorded a video of the company’s operation that showed cattle staggering about in apparent pain after their throats had been slit and their tracheas partly removed. Agriprocessors, while defending its techniques as a religious ritual, agreed to change some practices.

One of Aaron’s sons, the influential Brooklyn rabbi Moshe Rubashkin, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 2002 after writing $325,000 in bad checks related to a family business. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

More trouble may lie on the horizon.

Moshe Rubashkin pleaded guilty this year to storing hazardous waste without a permit at a defunct, family-owned textile plant in Allentown, Pa. His son pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents during the investigation. They have yet to be sentenced.

Supporters say the Rubashkins are no scofflaws, just unsophisticated businessmen who made some mistakes as their company grew.

“These are simple people. They are a family of butchers,” said Dovid Eliezrie, a California rabbi.

Scott Frotman, a spokesman for the Food and Commercial Workers union, called the company’s treatment of its immigrant work force “morally reprehensible.”

“They blame the media. They blame us. They refuse to accept responsibility for anything that is going on in that plant,” he said.

State and federal investigators are looking into various alleged violations at the company, such as employing underage employees and not paying workers, The family has not been charged.

“We are God-fearing people and we believe in the American system and we believe it will ultimately turn out OK,” Getzel Rubashkin, 24, a grandson of the family’s patriarch and an employee at Agriprocessors, told The AP in a recent interview.

He also said the family hasn’t given up on Postville, which he has called home since age 10.

“There are people who would like to see us leave, but on the whole we have very warm relations,” he said.