How A Chabad Rabbi Tricked 'Neo-Nazi' Frank Meeink Into Believing He Was Actually 'Jewish' - Christians for Truth (2024)

(The Jewish Chronicle) Former “neo-nazi” — Frank Meeink — whose life inspired Edward Norton’s character in the movie American History X — became convinced he was actually Jewish after a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi told him that he “looked Jewish” — and that his last name “sounded” Jewish:

“The former white supremacist and neo-Nazi who inspired Edward Norton’s skinhead character in “American History X” is now an observant Jew after discovering Jewish heritage through DNA testing.

Frank Meeink was a leader of a violent Aryan skinhead gang in the early 1990s that believed in inciting a race war.

Now, at 48, Meeink prays three times a day wearing the tefillin and tallit of observant Jews, goes to Torah study classes three times a week, keeps kosher and attends synagogue.

Meeink was prompted to take a DNA test after (((a friend))) commented that he “looked Jewish”.

He told the New York Post: “I just wanted to see if it was true, I wanted to see if it was real.”

He said finding out that he is 2.4 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish on the side of his mother’s maternal great, great-grandmother was “a beautiful gift from God.”

He credits his Jewish faith with helping him through the darkest period of his life, following the death of his 19-year-old son Josh, the breakdown of his marriage, and the loss of his mother to a fentanyl overdose.

While in recovery in Los Angeles, California for alcohol and drug abuse in 2019, he met his sponsor, a Jewish man he nicknamed his “recovery rabbi” who helped him find his faith.

“The thing I loved about Judaism is that it says, ‘Love the Lord your God’, and that you don’t need to force your God on nobody else. I want to try and build this relationship with God,” Meeink said.

He continues to call his “recovery rabbi” every morning at 8am and says Judaism has given him “humbleness, humility” and the desire to stand up for others.

Meeink had a violent and unpleasant upbringing in an Irish-Catholic enclave in South Philadelphia. His mother was a heavy user of drugs and alcohol, and his stepfather was abusive.

He grew up surrounded by black families and felt like an “outcast” at school. At age 13, he was introduced to neo-Nazi beliefs through his cousin, who had a mural of Hitler in his bedroom. The skinhead crew Meeink joined “justified all my fears,” he said.

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At 17, after his gang kidnapped a man and nearly killed another, Meeink was arrested. While in prison serving a three-year sentence, he bonded with and befriended black inmates, beginning his journey out of his racist views and former life…

…Meeink is now hoping to turn the full story of his life into a movie, which he believes would act as a sequel to American History X, and is in allegedly in talks with Oscar-nominated director Sam French.”

This feel-good story isn’t nearly as clear cut as this fluff piece would suggest — the deeply-troubled Frank Meeink has based his newly discovered Jewish identity on some very flimsy evidence.

It should raise a big red flag that a rabbi convinced Meeink that he was Jewish while in rehab recovering from drug and alcohol addiction — a time when he was most vulnerable, confused, and open to suggestion.

First off, his actual birth name was Bertone — his father was of Italian descent — but he changed his last name to Meeink — his mother’s maiden name — while in Catholic school.

According to another account, Meeink was convinced by a Chabad rabbi that his last name “sounded” Jewish:

“About five or six years ago, Rabbi Jacobson and I were talking for this documentary we were filming, and he told me that I look Jewish and that my last name sounds Jewish. He pointed out that having an eei in a last name was an old Jewish spelling that isn’t used anymore. It turns out that it comes from my mother’s father’s side, who were Jewish cheese makers. It’s just the craziest thing. I told him about my mother’s mother’s family and then he showed me his [tefillin] and how to put them on. It was a very special moment.”

This rabbi blatantly lied to Meeink — his last name is not Jewish, and certainly not Ashkenazi Jewish just based on the spelling.

Meeink is an old Dutch name — most people with this last name live in the Netherlands — and in 19th century America, the largest number of people with that last name in lived in Indiana — not a common landing place for Ashkenazi Jews.

And the “eei” spelling is common in the Dutch language — and very uncommon in Jewish or Yiddish words.

And, yes, the Dutch have a well-deserved reputation as cheese makers — much more so than Askenazi Jews.

The next issue is that this Chabad rabbi told the blue-eyed Meeink that he “looked Jewish” — which prompted Meeink to take a DNA test — which showed that he was “2.4%” Ashkenazi Jewish.

This rabbi obviously didn’t read a recent book which denied that there was any such thing as a stereotypical Jewish look — and to suggest such an idea is “antisemitic”.

There are many pictures of Meeink before his “conversion” to Judaism — and there doesn’t seem to be any particular — or stereotypical — Jewish “look” to him.

If anything makes him look somewhat “Jewish”, it would be his Italian ancestry — according to genetic studies, some southern Italians have the closest genetic profiles to Ashkenazi Jews — probably due to some arabic mixing.

That said, even if we accept that the DNA test is accurate — which it most certainly is not — how could having only 2.4% Jewish ancestry make him look like a stereotypical Jew?

These consumer DNA companies are largely Jewish-owned — and it is certainly in their interest to convince everyone who takes the tests that they are “a little bit” Jewish — after all, if you discover that you have Jewish ancestry, you’re less likely to engage in “antisemitism”.

And these DNA sites acknowledge that the margin of error for these tests is about 4% — so anyone with 2.5% Ashkenazi ancestry falls within that margin — meaning it’s just as likely that you have no Jewish DNA.

Even if Meeink is 2.5% Jewish, that would mean that his mother was only 5% Jewish — meaning only 1 ancestor out of the previous 20 could have been Jewish.

And yet Meeink would like us to believe that his maternal grandmother, who could not have been more than 10% Jewish — and was born a Meeink but married an Irishman named Mullen — actually practiced Judaism as a young girl — according to another interview,

“I started looking into things, and then my uncle wrote to me saying that I should look into Grandma Mullen. She had stayed in the Jewish neighborhood even after it turned Irish. I don’t really remember her very much; I remember going to her house when I was a little kid and she always had candy. I think that she even practiced Judaism with her family when she was a little girl, but as she got older they stayed in the Irish neighborhood and she married an Irish guy. When I found out, I was really cool with it.”

This sounds like an urban legend — his grandmother was allegedlyborn a Jew despite having only 10% Jewish ancestry — and his great-grandmother was only 20% Jewish — and you’d have to go back another 3 generations to find someone who was 100% Jewish.

And if she was born into a practicing Jewish family, she could not have married her Irish husband — Mullen — without having first converted to Catholicism, which is not mentioned at all in his family history.

Well, you might argue that his Dutch ancestors — the Meeink family — were originally Ashkenazi, but that’s unlikely considering that the Jews who settled in the Netherlands were of Sephardic origins — many having migrated there after the Spanish Inquisition.

So if Meeink does, in fact, have any Ashkenazi ancestry, it must have come from another family line that he is completely unaware of — a possibility, but not at all in line with the spurious narrative that he’s created for himself.

One thing is certain — that Meeink would not qualify citizenship in the racist state of Israel — he is not even remotely “hallachically” Jewish — nor would he pass the DNA test required for citizenship.

The racist, Jewish supremacist rabbis in Israel would reject him, not because of his “neo-nazi” past — but rather because his DNA is not kosher.

What is clear from Meeink’s conversion to Judaism is that it has opened many doors for him — the Jews have financially rewarded him for his new-found Jewish faith — while denouncing his “White supremacist” past.

We reported on a similar “conversion” — when German “neo-nazi”, Lutz Langer, became a tefillin-wearing Jew to please his disapproving Jewish overlords.

And when Hollywood makes a sequel to American History X, Meeink’s conversion may very well finally pay off in a big way, making him a millionaire — a “Jewish” millionaire.

[CFT Note: At about 22:00 into this interview, Meeink explains how he came to realize he was actually Jewish: