Gabriel of Białystok

Gabriel of Białystok (; ), also known as Gabriel of Zabłudów (; alternatively Gavrila or Gavriil; – April 20, 1690), is a child saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The story of his death is considered by some authors, especially from the Jewish community, as an example of antisemitic blood libel. His feast day is held on April 20 (of the Julian Calendar, which equates to May 3 of the Gregorian Calendar).

Biography According to tradition, six-year-old Gabriel was kidnapped from his home in the village of Zwierki (13 km from Zabłudów, Grodno Uezd, Grand Duchy of Lithuania; today's Poland) during the Jewish Passover, while his parents, pious Orthodox Christians Peter and Anastasia Govdel, were working in a nearby field. Shutko, a Jewish arendator of Zverki, was accused of taking the boy to Białystok, piercing him with sharp objects and draining his blood for nine days, before bringing the dead body back to Zverki and dumping it in a local field.

Relics and canonisation After the discovery of his body, Gabriel was buried in Zverki, in an area of the local cemetery where child plague-fatalities would later be interred. In a funeral of 1720, the grave was accidentally unearthed and the body was found to be supernaturally incorruptibile; the remains were then transferred to the crypt of Zverki's Orthodox church. Gabriel's cult grew over the years, largely due to reputed healings at his grave. In 1746, the relics were transferred to Zabłudów and then onto various locations. When his relics were transferred in 1755 to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Slutsk, in the Minsk Guberniya, a placard related that a Jew had been responsible for his death. His cult developed and spread throughout the Russian Empire, and he was canonized in 1820 . He is considered the patron saint of children. In 1944, they were moved to Grodno, where they stayed until 1992 when they were moved to Białystok , where they remain the focus of pilgrimages.

On July 27, 1997, a film depiction of the legend surrounding Gabriel's death was aired on Belarusian television which was criticised by Leonid Stonov as a move to "exploit the topic of blood libel." The revival of the cult in Belarus was cited as an expression of antisemitism in US State Department reports on human rights and religious freedoms, which were passed to the UNHCR.

The autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, operating within the communion of Russian Orthodoxy, has continued commemoration of Gabriel of Bialystok as a child martyr and saint but refer to his assailants only as "evil people" in the kontakion read on his feast day, emphasising "the evil of which fallen man is capable, regardless of ethnicity or creed."