Where What When

Blood Libel America 1928

In all generations they stand up to annihilate us, but He rescues us from their hand.” (Passover Haggada)

A blood libel is back in the news – though not a current one, fortunately. According to a new book by Israeli college professor Ariel Toaff, it seems the Jews really did it! Bloody Passovers: the Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders (published in Italy) presents “proof” that a ritual murder accusation in 1475 Italy might indeed have been true. The evidence? Simple: The Jews admitted to it! Of course, they were tortured, but why worry about details.

What makes this story really strange is that Toaff’s 91-year-old father is the former chief rabbi of Italy! (He repudiated his son’s book.) I guess some people really want to write a book but can’t think of a good topic. Something outlandish will get attention. Toaff certainly got attention. Let’s hope Bar Ilan University fires him.

Pesach is the time of year that our forefathers suffered terribly from the ridiculous notion that Jews kill Christians and use their blood for matzos. Blood libels occurred in Europe over and over again, with the first recorded incident in Norwich, England in 1144. The last recorded occurrence was in Lithuania, in 1948, and affected Holocaust survivors.

It happened here in the United States, as well. In 1928, in Massena, New York, a three-year-old Christian child named Barbara Griffiths wandered into the woods and got lost. Massena, a town along the Canadian border, had 8,000 people, with 19 Jewish families, one synagogue, and a rabbi.

Jews had moved to small towns throughout the 1800s to escape the overcrowded neighborhoods and sweatshops in New York. The main challenge of living in such far-flung areas was kosher food. With no such thing as a kosher store, every town needed a shochet. Louisville hired a shochet as early as 1831! Richmond in 1844, Pittsburgh in 1852, and Nashville in 1859. Every family in Massena maintained a chicken coop in the backyard, and brought them to the rabbi, Berel Brennglass, to shecht.

Rabbi Brennglass was a true scholar; he had learned in the famed Slabodka Yeshiva in Kovna, Lithuania and had come to America in 1915. He decided to leave New York City after suffering from tuberculosis. His job in Massena was to be the rabbi, shochet, and Hebrew teacher. Under his tenure, Massena remained rather observant. The Jewish children went to public school and attended Hebrew school afterwards. The rabbi’s own son, Samuel, was valedictorian of his high school class. (graduating at age 14!).

Life in Massena was pleasant and simple – until little Barbara Griffiths disappeared in the woods at 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 22, 1928. The townspeople, led by the mayor, searched for hours to no avail. They covered the entire wooded area where she could have possibly gone. Finally, night fell, and the searchers returned without success. The chief of the state police for that region was called in.

That night, some of the searchers went to a café owned by a Greek immigrant named Albert Comnas, who thought he knew who was been behind the disappearance. In the Old Country, the Jews needed the blood of Christians for their holidays, he said, and Yom Kippur was two days away! (Yom Kippur, Passover – it doesn’t make a difference!)

Comnas was raised with the vicious Jew hatred of Greek Orthodoxy that dates to St. John Chrysostom, who described synagogues as “the den of scoundrels, the temple of demons, the refuge of brigands and debauches, and the cavern of devils…” This was Christian love.

The police came into Jewish shops that night and searched the basements. The community leaders quickly called a meeting, realizing that there could be real trouble. What if this girl were never found? What if she were found dead? They decided to call one of the leaders of American Jewry, Louis Marshall, head of the American Jewish committee.

Marshall, the son of Jewish German immigrants, was a lawyer who helped found the AJC in 1906 and eventually devoted himself full time to Jewish causes. A Reform Jew and president of Temple Emanuel in New York, he spent his life helping the little guy: improving slums, mediating sweatshop strikes, etc. Marshall dispatched a friend and reporter, Boris Smolar, to investigate. It was a matter of extreme urgency, Marshall told him. Smolar got dressed as fast as he could and went to Grand Central Station. From there he took the first train north to Albany.

That Sunday morning, fear and anxiety reigned in Massena. The police went to talk to a Morris Goldberg, who was raised in New York City – in a gentile orphanage! Unlike the others Jews in Massena, Goldberg knew no Hebrew or Yiddish. The troopers asked him what he knew about ritual uses of blood in Judaism, and he apparently said, “I don’t know if such a custom exists in the Old Country, but in this country they don’t have this custom.” Thanks.

Around noon, state trooper Mickey McCann called the Rabbi and requested that he come down to police headquarters. No one had told the Rabbi what was going on, in an attempt to shelter him from the trouble. At the police station, hundreds of people were milling around. Remember, it was a Sunday. Trooper McCann asked Rabbi Brennglass if tomorrow was a holiday. When the reply was yes, he asked, “Can you give any information whether your people in the Old Country offer human sacrifices?”

Brennglass responded, “I am surprised that an officer in the United States, the most enlightened country in the world, would dare to ask such a foolish and ridiculous question.”

“Was there ever a time when the Jewish people used human blood?” he continued.

Rabbi Brennglass explained that both human and animal blood is forbidden, and that this accusation was a slander against the entire Jewish people. He demanded to know who started this rumor. McCann apologized, and the Rabbi left.

Outside the police station, he walked out into the mob. “What do you people want?” the Rabbi shouted. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you looking for the girl instead of standing around? You should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves. By what nerve do you insinuate such things against your Jewish neighbors? Go home and pray to G-d that He should forgive you for what you are thinking.”

With that, the crowd parted, and the Rabbi went home to prepare for Yom Kippur, now only a few hours away. At 3 p.m., the reporter Smolar arrived. As he sat at the Rabbi’s house and listened to the story, a group of Jews burst in and shouted, “The child has been found! The child is alive.” Two of the searchers finally saw her emerging from the brush into a field and they hitched a ride into town.

You would think the story ended there, right? But, that evening, as the Jews walked to Kol Nidre, they heard, “Scared you into returning the girl, didn’t we?”

In the weeks that followed, a meeting was held between prominent Jewish citizens, the police, and the mayor. It seems that ignorance and pressure on the police had caused them to follow the café owner’s “lead.” Trooper McCann and Mayor Gilbert Hawes offered up apology after apology. The mayor wanted to hush things up. Instead, the story became international news.

In Massena, things eventually quieted down, and life returned to normal. I am not sure what we learn from this story. It is not the same kind of case as the Triangle Fire, the lynching of Leo Frank down South, or the Mendel Beiluss trial in Russia. Those cases changed the world. Perhaps the Massena case teaches us that It can happen anywhere – although nowadays, in our new era of international Arab terrorism, small-town shenanigans no longer seem very significant. In those days, however, this was big news, making Jews in this country uneasy at the specter of an ongoing antisemitism they thought they had left behind in Europe.

Postscript: I tried to find the rabbi’s son, Samuel Brennglass, only to learn that he passed away a couple of months ago at the age of 94! How sad that I never got the chance to talk to him! He was probably the last witness to the above events. Mr. Brennglass, a prominent attorney and Orthodox lay leader, was honored in 2000 by the Orthodox Union for the pivotal role he played in founding NCSY in 1954.

Most of the information in this article is from the book The Incident at Massena, by Saul Friedman, who saved the story for posterity.

Eli Pollock is a CPA in Baltimore.

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Article List - April 2007