St. Gabriel of Biatystok was only 6 years old when he was killed in a Jewish blood ritual. A Jew was accused of piercing the boy with sharp objects and draining his blood for nine days then dumped his body in a field.
Some authorities have expressed concern that veneration of Gabriel of Białystok may be used to foment anti-Semitism. In a 1997 report to the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ), first deputy of the Euro-Asiatic Jewish Congress, Yakov Basin suggested:
Contemporary accounts, which claim that Jews murdered a boy in a ritual manner in order to use his blood, are resurrecting the medieval canard that Jews use the blood of Christian babies for their ritual purposes during pre-Passover days. On April 11, 1690, a few days before the beginning of Passover, 6 year-old Gavril Belostoksky was found murdered and drained of his blood in his village of Zverki, which was at the time a Belarusian town, but is now in Polish territory. Soon thereafter, the accusation that he had been murdered by Jews who needed his blood to bake matzoth was spread throughout Belarus. The libel was bolstered in 1844 in Vladimir Dal's book, Investigation of the Murder of Christian Babies by Jews and the Use of Their Blood. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Gavril in the 20th century as the patron saint of sick children; he is commemorated in the beginning of each May.[8]
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[10] which were passed to the UNHCR.[11]
The autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, operating within the communion of Russian Orthodoxy, has continued commemoration of Gabriel of Bialystok as a childmartyr and saint[12] 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".