On This Day in Jewish History: Adil Kikinesh
On this day in 1718, Adil Kikinesh was executed in Lemberg for a crime that never happened, making this day her yartzeit. She lived in Drohobycz, a town where Jews outnumbered their neighbors two to one. Her father, Rabbi Moshe Kikinesh, was a wealthy merchant and communal leader in Lemberg, and her husband learned Torah day and night while she ran the family salt business with great success. Her beauty, her wisdom, and her legendary way with words bred resentment among the local nobles and priests, and a group of them set out to destroy her and, through her, the entire Jewish community.
They chose Pesach. On Seder night, as she sat at the table with her family, officers pounded on the door and arrested her for the murder of a Christian child. Her non-Jewish maid stood up and testified that Adil had persuaded her to kill her own child for a Jewish ritual, and a search of the house produced the body in the basement. Under torture she was pressed to name accomplices. She understood the choice before her: deny it and endanger every Jew in the town, or confess to a crime she had not committed and die alone. She confessed. She was tried in Lemberg and sentenced to be dragged over stones by a wild stallion and then burned. When the maid heard the sentence she recanted and named the priests who had put her up to it, and they had her quietly strangled in prison before she could be questioned further. Adil was offered her life if she would accept baptism. She refused.
The execution filled Rynok Square, the main marketplace of Lemberg, with tens of thousands of onlookers packed onto rooftops and into windows while the judges sat robed on a dais. Archbishop Jan Skarbek asked whether she had a final wish. She asked that her hands be untied and that she be given pins, and she used them to fasten the hem of her dress into the flesh of her legs so that her body would not be exposed when the horse dragged her. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery, and her grave became a place of pilgrimage.
