Menahem Mendel Beilis - After The Trial

After The Trial

The Beilis trial was followed worldwide and the antisemitic policies of the Russian Empire were severely criticized. The Beilis case was compared with the Leo Frank case in which an American Jew, manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan and lynched after his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

After his acquittal, Beilis became an enormous hero and celebrity. One indication of the extent of his fame: "Anyone wanting to see the major stars of New York’s Yiddish stage on Thanksgiving weekend in 1913 had three choices: Mendel Beilis at Jacob Adler’s Dewey Theater, Mendel Beilis at Boris Thomashefsky’s National Theater, or Mendel Beilis at David Kessler’s Second Avenue Theater.”

Due to his great fame and the adulation he received, Beilis could have become wealthy through commercial appearances and the like. Spurning all such offers, he and his family left Russia for Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire.

Beilis had difficulty making ends meet in Palestine, but for years he resisted leaving. When friends and well-wishers pleaded with him to go to America, he would respond: “Before, in Russia, when the word ‘Palestine’ conjured up a waste and barren land, even then I chose to come here in preference to other countries. How much more, then, would I insist on staying here, after I have come to love the land!”

Finally, however, Beilis’s financial situation became too desperate. In 1921 he settled in the United States where in 1925 he self-published an account of his experiences, The Story of My Sufferings. Originally published in Yiddish (1925 and 1931 editions), the book was later translated into English (1926, 1992, and 2011 editions), and also Russian.

Beilis died unexpectedly at a hotel in Saratoga Springs on 24 Tammus 5694 (July 7, 1934) and was buried two days later at the Mount Carmel in Queens, NY. Leo Frank and Sholem Aleichem are also buried there. Read English translation of the epitaph on Beilis' footstone.

Though Beilis’s fame had faded since the trial in 1913, it returned briefly at his death. His funeral was attended by over 4,000 people. The New York Times noted that Beilis’s fellow Jews “always believed that his conduct saved his countrymen from a pogrom.” A history of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, where Beilis’s funeral was held, describes the scene at his funeral as follows: “The crowd could not be contained in the sanctuary. As many as a dozen policemen failed to establish order in the streets.”

Around six months before his death, Beilis was interviewed by the English-language Jewish Daily Bulletin. Asked for “one outstanding impression” of the trial in Kiev, he paid a final tribute to the Russian Gentiles who had helped him to escape the blood libel, such as the detective Krasovsky and the journalist Brazul-Brushkovsky: “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.”

In the same interview, Beilis stated that he had never become used to life in America: “I still long for Palestine.”