Patrick Comerford
In the past, I have written about Judge Frank D Comerford (1879-1929), the Chicago judge, Democratic politician, journalist and author, and his nephew, the Very Revd Professor Comerford Joseph O’Malley (1902-1991)who was President and Chancellor of DePaul University, Chicago.
They were members of an interesting branch of the Comerford family which once had homes in Kinvara, Co Galway, and Ballykeel House, Kilfenora, Co Clare.
In my research in recent days, I have also come across the story of Judge Frank Comerford’s wife, Lyela Julia Edelman Brandeis Comerford (1880-1946), the descendant of an interesting and pioneering Jewish family in Los Angeles.
Lyela Comerford was a granddaughter of the first resident rabbi in Los Angeles, a niece of both the architect and a president of the best-known synagogue in Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard Temple. and she was a sister-in-law of one of the passengers who died on the Titanic in 1912.
With her family background, and Hollywood connections, and life on Park Avenue in Manhattan, many may have thought Lyela Comerford was born to a glamorous society or star-filled life. Instead, she was widowed twice, and was swindled and defrauded by another husband.
Her first husband was a member of a prominent Jewish business and legal family who gave their name to a ‘Hidden Ivies’ university; her second husband was a fraudster who swindled her out of her immense widow’s fortune; and her third husband, Judge Frank Comerford, was the descendant of a prominent branch of the Comerford family in Co Galway.
Lyela Julia Edelman was born on 2 March 1880 in Los Angeles, California. She was the daughter of Benjamin W Edelman (1853-1922) and Laura Morris Studebaker (1863-1939). Benjamin Edelman’s father and Lyela Comerford’s grandfather was Rabbi Abraham Wolf Edelman (1832-1907), the pioneer rabbi of Los Angeles. He was born in Poland in 1832, he married Hannah Pessah Cohn in Warsaw in 1851, and they then moved to the US. Eight years later, they were living in San Francisco, where Abraham continued his Hebrew studies, teaching Hebrew, and for a time acting as a dry goods salesman.
When Rabbi Edelman arrived in the pueblo of Los Angles, it was still a wild west frontier town. Joseph Newmark (1799-1881), the founder of the first Ashkenazic congregation in New York and then the organiser of the Jewish community in Los Angeles, persuaded Abraham Edelman to come to Los Angeles as its first full-time rabbi and Jewish spiritual leader. He served Congregation B’nai B’rith from its beginnings in 1862 until 1885, and for more than two decades he was the Jewish spiritual leader of Los Angeles.
Rabbi Edelman is said to have been a ‘traditional’ Orthodox rabbi – although this was not quite accurate. There were two good reasons for his move to Los Angeles: the children needed a teacher to help them maintain their Jewish identity and spiritual heritage, and the adults wanted a Jewish spokesman and ambassador. Edelman fulfilled both roles and combined the offices of rabbi and cantor. But he never claimed ordination, and before coming to Los Angeles he had never held a pulpit.
Rabbi Edelman eventually became the victim of his own success and the growth of the Jewish community in Los Angeles. He retired in 1886, although, in reality, he had been eased out in a way calculated to spare the rabbi’s feelings and to protect the congregation.
Joseph Newmark’s nephew, Harris Newmark, who was President of B’nai B’rith Congregation in 1881-1887, claimed Edelman felt he had to resign when the synagogue wanted a more Reform or liberal ritual. But the evidence suggests that Edelman was never part of a truly Orthodox establishment. He had shown signs of non-Orthodox leanings, and allowed mixed seating for men and women, a mixed choir, conformation ceremonies, and English prayers and sermons.
Congregation B’nai B’rith developed a type of Reform Judaism that was grounded in tradition yet committed to contemporary relevance. However, despite the community’s growth, Rabbi Edelman lacked the glamour desired in a new era. Los Angeles still loved ‘old Edelman,’ but they decided to sideline him. From June 1885 to June 1886, he served Congregation Ahavai Sholom in Portland, Oregon, but he resigned after a year, citing the ‘dampness of the Oregon climate,’ and returned to Los Angeles.
Abraham and Hannah Edelman were the parents of six children, two daughters and four sons, including: Benjamin W Edelman (1853-1922), the father of Lyela Julia (Edelman) Comerford; Abram M Edelman (1863-1941), a prolific architect in Los Angeles; and Dr David W Edelman. Congregation B’nai B’rith was rebuilt in the Moorish style in 1929 and soon after was renamed the Wilshire Boulevard Temple; its president at the time was Dr David W Edelman and its architect was Abram M Edelman, sons of the founding rabbi and uncles of Lyela Brandeis Comerford.
The Wilshire Boulevard Temple, formerly Congregation B’nai B’rith, is a Reform congregation and synagogue and the oldest and one of the largest Jewish congregations in Los Angeles. The main building has a large Byzantine Revival dome modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, and the interior murals were commissioned by the Warner Brothers, Jack Harry and Albert.
Wilshire Boulevard Temple has been led by several influential rabbis, including Edgar Magnin, described as the ‘John Wayne’ of rabbis and the ‘rabbi to the stars’, who served for 69 years, from 1915 to 1984. It was designated as a City of Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument in 1973 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
Lyela Julia (Edelman) Comerford was born in Los Angeles on 2 March 1880. She was 20 in 1900 when she married her first husband, H Hugo Brandeis (1868-1912), at the Los Angeles home of her aunt, Rachel L Barnett (1857-1950), and uncle William G Barnet (1852-1930). The wedding was performed by her grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Edelman, assisted by Rabbi Sigmund Hecht (1849-1925), who had become the senior rabbi in Los Angeles in 1899.
Hugo Brandeis was born in Wisconsin in January 1868. His family owned a large department store chain in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the son of Jonas Leopold Brandeis (1836-1903), a dry goods merchant, and Francesca Teweles (1845-1905), both were Jewish immigrants.
The Brandeis family was once a prominent rabbinic family in Prague. The extended Brandeis family included the Dante scholar Irma Brandeis (1905-1999); and Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941), an associate justice on the US Supreme Court ( 1916-1939), who gave his name to Brandeis University.
Judge Louis Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Supreme Court. During his career, he fought railroad monopolies, defended workplace and labour laws, challenged antisemitism and helped create the Federal Reserve System. He criticised the power of large banks, money trusts, powerful corporations, monopolies, public corruption, and mass consumerism. He was a courageous and militant advocate of social justice. He was seen as being incorruptible, was known as the ‘People’s Lawyer’, and The Economist called him ‘A Robin Hood of the law.’
Jonas Leopold Brandeis was from Libeň in Prague, then in the Austrian empire and now the capital of the Czech Republic. Franciska ‘Fannie’ Teweles was born in Prague. They emigrated to the US around 1856 and were married in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, around 1862.
Jonas Leopold Brandeis was the founder of the successful dry goods business, JL Brandeis & Sons. His wife was a wealthy patron of the arts and was a founder of the Wise Memorial Hospital in Omaha and its president from 1901 until she died in 1905. They are buried in Pleasant Hill Jewish Cemetery in North Omaha, also known as Temple Israel Cemetery, the oldest Jewish Cemetery in Nebraska.
Hugo Brandeis was one of four children, and his siblings were: Arthur Donoen Brandeis (1862-1916); Sarah (1867-1936), who married Herman Cohn; and Emil Franklin Brandeis (1864-1912). Emil Brandeis died on the Titanic on 14/15 April 1912. It was falsely rumoured that he tried to sneak onto one of the life boats by putting on a dress. When his body was recovered, he was buried in Pleasant Hill Jewish Cemetery, Omaha.
Hugo Brandeis was the youngest partner in JL Brandeis with his brother and was a prominent dry goods merchant in Omaha. He died at the age of 44 on 21 July 1912 in hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, after an operation, and was buried in Pleasant Hill Jewish Cemetery. He left Leyla a widow with a substantial fortune.
Two years later, Lyela married her second husband, Charles Wesley Turner jr (1885-1941), in London on 27 August 1914. He managed the Brandeis Theatre in Omaha and was also a stockbroker. He had previously been married in 1909 to Etta May Schneider (1886-1969), and when Charles and Etta divorced she returned to live with her parents in Dodge, Nebraska.
In a dramatic turn of events less than four years of their marriage, Charles Wesley Turner was convicted on 26 May 1918 in New York of theft from his wife through a securities fraud of $35,000 – in all, Lyela claimed, he had defrauded her of $325,000. He was later drafted into the US army, and they were divorced in 1919. Turner later married his third wife, Janet Megrew (1904-1988), but they had divorced by 1940, and he died in Chester, New Jersey, on 18 June 1941.
Lyela married her third husband, Frank D Comerford (1879-1929), in the Municipal Building in Manhattan, New York, on 10 November 1926. She gave her name as Leyla Studebaker Brandeis, and was living at 570 Park Avenue, a remarkable 13-storey building designed in the Georgian style by the architect Emery Roth (1870-1948).
Frank Comerford was a judge in Illinois, a Democratic politician, a journalist and an author. Their wedding came as a surprise to their friends and was attended only by Lyela’s mother, Laura Morris Studebaker, and ‘a few intimate friends’.
Frank D Comerford was born on 25 September 1879 in Chicago. He was the son of Isaac Comerford (1829-1900) of Kinvara, Co Galway, and Mary ‘Jane’ (Linnane) Comerford (1841-1914). Isaac Comerford of Kinvara was a younger brother of Henry Comerford (1827-1861), a prominent Galway merchant and magistrate who lived at Merchant’s Road, Galway, and Ballykeel House, Kilfenora, Co Clare. Henry bought up the Gregory estate in Kinvara in the 1850s and his post-Famine efforts to impose exorbitant rent increases in the town brought financial ruin to Kinvara and brought the Comerford family to the brink of social and economic disaster.
Isaac Comerford remained in Kinvara as a shopkeeper for about a decade, and married Mary Jane Linnane. Their first seven children were born in Kinvara: Henry (1858), John Henry (1859), Mary (1860), Bridget (1861), Michael (1862), Alice ‘Ella’ (1863) and George Henry (1865). Isaac and Mary Jane Comerford emigrated to the US around 1866, and settled in Chicago, Illinois, and five more children were born there: Elizabeth (1867), Jane (1871), Thomas Joseph (1877), Anne (1878) and Frank (1879).
Frank D Comerford studied at Northwestern University and the Illinois College of Law in Chicago. After graduation, he was admitted to the Illinois State Bar in 1904. Later that year, at the age of 24, Comerford was elected to the Illinois State Senate in November 1904 from the 2nd District, representing part of Cook County, Illinois.
Three months later, Frank D Comerford was expelled from the Illinois State Senate in February 1905 for allegedly besmirching the name of the Senate at a lecture in Chicago in which he accused the Senate of corruption. He was the first elected official expelled from the Illinois legislature.
In a speech at the Illinois College of Law, he claimed the state senate was merely ‘a great public auction, where special privileges are sold to the highest corporation bidders.’ He made specific accusations of wrongdoing, named names, and gave dates and financial details. He tried to protect himself by saying these stories were ‘in common circulation at the Capitol.’
The Illinois legislature quickly passed a resolution that accused Comerford of spreading ‘assertions, slanders, insinuations and incriminations’ that called into question ‘the honour and integrity of the Illinois General Assembly.’ A special committee of the Illinois House of Representatives was hastily established and took extensive testimony before deciding Comerford’s allegations were unfounded.
The report of the special committee was placed before the House on 8 February 1905, and the newly-elected Senator was expelled on a 121-13 vote. Unbowed, Comerford ran for the seat again – this time as an independent – and was re-elected. He was unsuccessful in his bid for re-election in 1906, however, and later accepted a position as police attorney of Chicago under the Democratic mayor, Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne. Comerford set up his own private practice as an attorney in 1917, and after the US entered World War I in 1917 he spent the rest of the war as a public speaker selling bonds on behalf of the Liberty Loan programme.
After World War I, Comerford travelled to London and Paris for six months in 1919. He witnessed at first hand the rapidly changing social and political situation and contributed news reports to the Chicago Tribune. He was a vocal advocate of the US joining the League of Nations, warning that ‘the failure to establish a League of Nations would be a world tragedy and in its wake may come revolution.’
Comerford was the special prosecutor in the 1920 case of William Bross Lloyd and members of the Communist Labor Party of America. The defence attorney Clarence Darrow later defended the teacher John T Scopes in the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial, in which he opposed the statesman and orator William Jennings Bryan. Comerford was elected to the bench as a Superior Court judge in Chicago in June 1926.
Frank D Comerford was twice married. On 19 March 1906, he married in Saint Joseph’s Church, Berrien, Michigan, Jean Cowgill (1875-1948). They later divorced, and on 10 November 1926 in Manhattan, he married the widowed Lyela Edelman Brandeis (1880-1946) from Omaha, Nebraska.
Lyela and Frank Comerford spent their honeymoon in Cuba, and then returned to Chicago to live at the Lake Shore Drive Hotel.
Frank Comerford complained of chest pain while visiting his brother’s home in Chicago on 29 August 1929. Two of his nephews, Dr Francis Xavier O’Malley (1895-1974) and Dr John Gabriel O’Malley (1888-1935), were called to the house. Neither doctor found anything obviously wrong, however, and he was not taken to hospital. At 8:55 pm, however, Comerford suffered a massive heart attack and died five minutes later. He was 49 years old. He was buried at Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum in Chicago.
After Frank Comerford died, Lyela continued to live in Chicago until 1940, and later lived in Paolo Alto, California. She had been widowed twice, divorced once, and defrauded by one of those hubans. She had no children. Lyela died on 30 July 1946 at the age of 66 in Los Angeles, and she was buried not with Frank Comerford but alongside her first husband, Hugo Brandeis, in Pleasant Hill Jewish Cemetery, Omaha, Nebraska.
Her gravestone names her as Lyela Brandeis Comerford, without any reference to her second husband, Charles Wesley Turner jr.
זכרונה לברכה, May her memory be a blessing.
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