Lynching Victim Leo Frank Honored In Ceremony

Jewish leaders gathered last Thursday to mark the anniversary of the death of Leo Max Frank, the only Jew ever to be lynched in the United States.
Frank was honored at his gravesite in Ridgewoods Old Mt. Carmel Cemetery, where he was buried after he was hung in Georgia by an anti-Semitic mob on August 17, 1915, two years after his wrongful conviction for murdering a 13-year-old girl.
Franks arrest inspired the creation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and remains one of the most notorious chapters of legal injustice in American history.
"We have to stand against racism and anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head," said Rabbi Manny Behar, executive director of the Queens Jewish Community Council.
Jeff Gottlieb, president of the Queens Jewish Historical Society and one of the ceremonys organizers, said, "We felt it was time that we commemorated someone who kept his cool under fierce anti-Semitism."
Frank was working in his uncles pencil factory in Atlanta in 1913 when a young employee, Mary Phagan, was found murdered in the factory. Despite the weak case against him, Frank was convicted of the murder and sentenced to hang amid fiercely anti-Semitic press coverage of the trial.
John Slaton, Georgias then-Governor, believed Frank was innocent and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. However, a mob kidnapped Frank from prison and executed him two months later.
According to Gottlieb, Frank showed great courage in his final minutes and even gave a mob member his wedding ring to give to his wifewhich she received. He added that Frank was buried in Queens because of a lack of cemetery space in Brooklyn, where his family lived.
Eventually, Franks parents, brother, sister-in-law and other extended family were buried alongside the famous martyr. Franks posthumous pardon in 1986 by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles was based on the states failure to protect him in prison, but did not find him innocent.
"Even though he was in jail, he was always hopeful. He always thought everything was going to be okay," said Katherine Smithline, Franks grandniece, who came from her home in New Jersey to light a candle in his memory.
Her great-uncles fate was a source of shame in her family for many years. "There was a time I couldnt even broach the subject," said Smithline, who heard the story for the first time as a teenager. "It was an emotional thing, a very difficult thing to discuss."
The specter of recent synagogue desecrations in France and suicide bombings in Israel served to tie the lynching to current events.
"When it comes to anti-Semitism, the dates change but the oppressors remain the same," said Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg of Congregation Etz Chaim in Kew Gardens Hills. "We are here to tell the world, in the name of Leo Frank, that we dont believe in hate. Even though terrorists would have us believe that human beings with proper training can be desensitized to the greatest evils, we believe that man was created in the image of God."
Smithlines husband Martin read a prayer for the dead, and ADL leaders Joel Levy and Ari Jacobson distributed special Jerusalem stones, traditionally left on a grave by Jewish mourners, to the assembled audience.
Fourteen interns with the ADLs "A World of Difference" program attended the ceremony. The program is designed to train high school students to teach tolerance to their peers.
Frances Handy, 17, saw a parallel between Franks lynching and those of her fellow African Americans at the time. "Thats what connects us," said the intern from Staten Island. "It happens everywhere. That is why we need to fight prejudice together. Not just blacks, not just Jews. We have to do it together."