Join Congregation Kol Ami for the next installment in our Sunday Scholars series, as we learn the history of one of the most notorious and highly publicized trials in U.S. History, the case of "The People v. Leo Frank," presented by Jerry Rishe.

 

 

Leo Frank was a northern educated Jew convicted of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked in a pencil factory in Atlanta where Frank was superintendent. Before Frank was lynched there was a controversial question of commutation and an attempt on his life while in custody. After Frank was murdered, photographs of the lynching were phenomenal sellers, the publisher responsible for widespread dissemination of an anti-Semitic magazine during Frank’s trial was elected as a Georgia State Senator and the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. Please join us for a fascinating & thought provoking presentation of this case, and the implications for Anti-Semitism today.

 

Jerry Rishe earned a B.A. degree in Political Science from CSUN and a J.D. from Whittier Law School. In the private sector he worked as in-house counsel at First Charter Financial Corporation (holding company for American Savings), the J.G. Boswell Company (the largest privately owned cotton grower in the world), and Saint John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. For the last half of his 32 year legal career he was a trial attorney with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (later the Department of Homeland Security) where he prosecuted those charged with violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act in Immigration Court, defended the Service and Department against charges in employment matters and was honored by being named Employee of the Year. He is now enjoying retirement as President of SAGE, a life-long learning organization, as part of the Dean’s Council of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSUN, and as a docent for the Autry National Center of the American West.