With Passover Approaching, Christians a Century Ago Believed We Made Matzos From Their Children’s Blood!
The Forward. A century ago in Russia, Mendel Beilis was brought up on charges that he ritually murdered a Christian child and used his blood to make matzo for Passover. Beilis was arrested in Kiev and jailed for more than two years in deplorable conditions.
The czarist government sought a false confession, but Beilis refused. In the fall of 1913, Beilis was brought to trial and was acquitted by an all-Christian jury, with seven of the 12 members having been part of an anti-Semitic Black Hundreds organization.
The jury initially voted to convict Beilis by a vote of 7 to 5, which would have led to a verdict of “guilty” under Russian law at the time. But Oskar Gruzenberg, Beilis’s lead defense counsel, said “when the foreman began taking the final vote, one peasant rose to his feet, prayed to the icon and said, resolutely, ‘I don’t want to have this sin on my soul — he’s not guilty.’”
After his acquittal, Beilis spent a few years in Palestine before moving to New York. In 1926, he published a memoir, “The Story of My Sufferings.” He died in 1934. According to a report in The New York Times, his funeral was attended by more than 4,000 people.
When asked years later of his impression of the trial, Beilis answered, “The Russian gentiles, who sacrificed themselves for me. There was real heroism, real sacrifice. They knew that by defending me, their careers would be ruined; even their very lives would not be safe. But they persisted because they knew I was innocent.”