Kenneth J. Bialkin, who as an eminent corporate lawyer played an important role in the merger that created the world’s largest financial services company, and who as the leader of Jewish organizations helped negotiate freedom for Soviet Jews, died on Aug. 23 in Manhattan. He was 89 .

The cause was a stroke, his daughter Lisa Beth Bialkin said.

Mr. Bialkin was chairman of the national Anti-Defamation League when it won a posthumous pardon for Leo M. Frank, the Jewish pencil factory superintendent convicted in 1913 of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl in Georgia. Two years after his questionable conviction was commuted to life imprisonment, Frank was lynched in an outbreak of anti-Semitism that shocked the nation and led to the formation of the league.

After Alonzo Mann, another man who worked in the factory, acknowledged in 1982 that he had seen a janitor carrying the girl’s body, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith joined with the American Jewish Committee and the Atlanta Jewish Federation in petitioning the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to reverse the verdict.