Biography
Israel Blankenstein was an organizer for the Communist Party prosecuted in Pennsylvania for underground Communist organizing. He was reported as sentenced to two to four years, with an appeal pending and an application for amnesty planned.
This was a state prosecution. An earlier version of this record carried a federal Espionage or Sedition Act charge and described him under anti-militarism; neither fits the case.
The Daily Worker of January 28, 1924 reported that Israel Blankenstein had sent three dollars to the newspaper from his prison cell at the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. The item supplies direct contemporary evidence of actual imprisonment, while its newspaper-subscription appeal identifies the prisoners as political and class-war prisoners. It does not establish his admission or release day, or show that the entire imposed two-to-four-year term was served.
The February 26, 1924 Daily Worker political-prisoner roster individually prints Israel Blankenstein with historical prisoner number A12662. The entry appears under Western State Penitentiary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a contemporary institutional identifier, not a federal BOP register number. No admission or release date, individual sentence length, actual duration, organizational membership or present status is inferred.
The May 1926 Labor Defender reports that Blankenstein received a two-to-four-year sentence in December 1922. Its account describes a warrantless search of his socialist books and pretrial county-jail detention while bail was raised successively from $5,000 to $10,000 and finally $15,000, which his supporters could not raise. These are contemporary allegations and nominal sentencing facts; the phrase went up for two years is not entered as proof of an exact actual term.
