Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore

THIS IS A DESCRIPTION OF THE INCIDENT AT MASSENA ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY — QUITE SOMETHING! JOHN Massena is a quiet city in upstate New York. It sits beside the St. Lawrence River across the water from Canada. The Jewish population of Massena is small and supports one synagogue. Massena seems an unlikely location for a major event in American Jewish history, but it was. In 1928, a blood libel accusation against the 100 or so Jewish residents then living in Massena tore the city apart. Blood libels have been a part of Jewish history at least since 1144, when the Jews of England were accused of having purchased a Christian boy –the child martyr, William of Norwich—to torture and crucify him. At the heart of the blood libel is the charge that Jews murder Christian children to procure their blood, or more rarely their internal organs, to make matzoh at Passover. Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales, accused the “cursed Jewes” of infanticide in “The Prioress’s Tale.” The myth of Jewish ritual sacrifice persisted through the centuries and occasionally resonated on the fringes of American society, no place more openly and angrily than in Massena, New York. On erev Yom Kippur, 1928, the New York State police brought in Rabbi Berel Brennglass of Massena’s Orthodox congregation Adath Israel for questioning. Four-year-old Barbara Griffiths of Massena had disappeared and Albert Comnas, an immigrant from Salonika, Greece, charged that, as the …