On a cold Halloween evening in late October 1950, dozens of Jewish youngsters and their mates gathered for merriment within the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester on the Hecht Home, a Jewish neighborhood middle that supplied job coaching and hosted social occasions. Whereas there, they celebrated the vacation with dancing, cake and ice cream.
Then, terror approached once more.
Motivated by antisemitism, neighborhood teenagers launched a brutal assault on the premises of Hecht Home that left lots of the younger Jews on the occasion injured and a few hospitalized. The attackers confronted no repercussions.
The assaults at Hecht Home sparked neighborhood conversations about anti-Jewish violence and its minimization by native authorities, themes that resonate at the moment given the rising numbers of antisemitic hate crimes.
Particulars of the Hecht Home assaults stay neglected in historic analyses about antisemitism, the place outbursts like these are sometimes discounted as sporadic or insignificant.
But the incident – and what led as much as it and its subsequent fallout – underscore the significance of taking antisemitic extremism severely.
Origins of violence
My analysis on the historical past of antisemitic radicalism in America led me to the papers of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit group that fights antisemitism and extremism, the place I discovered in regards to the Hecht Home assaults.
The difficulty began months earlier than the assaults, when non-Jewish teenagers started assaulting Jews all through Boston, a outstanding vacation spot for Jewish individuals displaced by World Battle II.
Coupled with longtime antisemitic myths, the presence of those Jewish teenagers, referred to as “foreigners” by some white Bostonians, spelled catastrophe for some members of Boston’s Jewish neighborhood. As I discovered additional in my analysis, new immigrants weren’t the one Jews to endure violence all through the Nineteen Fifties.
Youth gangs roamed the streets shouting frequently, “Come on out you soiled Jews, we’re going to stone and kill you!”
In a single incident, a bunch attacked a disabled Jewish battle veteran incapable of defending himself. In one other, they beat a Jewish refugee boy whose dad and mom had perished in a Nazi focus camp.
In feedback to native newspapers and official experiences, Boston police downplayed such assaults as signs of “juvenile delinquency,” blaming dangerous parenting and teenage mischief reasonably than a poisonous ideology.
When the Jewish Neighborhood Council of Boston complained to authorities in regards to the wave of youth violence, officers responded with indifference, if not outright disdain.
“Youngsters have at all times referred to as one another names and fought,” stated one official to native Jewish leaders. In accordance with the Jewish Neighborhood Council’s information, one other widespread response was that the Jews had been “simply attempting to fire up hassle,” studying “prejudice into fist fights.”
Halloween at Hecht Home
Days earlier than the Halloween assault, drunken teenagers broke into Hecht Home and spouted antisemitic slurs. A struggle erupted with Jewish residents, who kicked them out.
However the drunken teenagers promised to ultimately return and “clear up the Jews.”
On the home, a Jewish boy quickly found a observe warning that “Hecht Home Jews” had higher “be careful.” The Anti-Defamation League collected the information of the encounter from the Jews concerned.
When the Halloween assault lastly occurred, between 1,500 and a couple of,000 spectators gathered near Hecht Home, hoping to catch a glimpse of the motion.
The primary sufferer, David Sault, was a Christian good friend of the Jewish residents. He tried to enter the home by means of a again door when six boys seized him and beat him unconscious with a baseball bat. A police report listed the incident as “injured by falling from a ledge.”
Anti-Defamation League
In accordance with eyewitnesses, a gang of at the least 15 assailants started a violent rampage chasing Jews from Hecht Home down poorly lit neighborhood streets. They battered one Jewish boy, Milton Segal, with a tire chain, leaving him with a damaged nostril and cuts on his face and chest. Although he was hospitalized, Segal’s case didn’t seem in police information.
Two Jewish teenagers touring to the occasion heard of the commotion and eliminated their trouser belts, ready to defend themselves. Police accosted the pair and cuffed them for “being armed with a weapon,” however they had been rapidly launched.
Two days later, when false rumors circulated inside the Jewish neighborhood {that a} Jewish boy had died because of his accidents, some Jewish youngsters vowed revenge.
To keep away from suspicion, they left Hecht Home in small teams to confront the gang by a bowling alley. Each teams got here armed with axes, razors and brass knuckles, however a policeman drew his revolver to cease the factions from preventing.
Eighteen of the 25 Jewish boys current had been booked for participation in a struggle, however the dozens of white Bostonians concerned escaped penalties.
The violence endured all through the Nineteen Fifties as Jews and others within the Boston neighborhood disagreed over its origins and the function of antisemitism. One author for the Boston Herald commented that some neighborhood members may “dismiss these incidents as boy stuff and unavoidable.”
Anti-Defamation League
One other journalist within the Boston Traveler wrote that “the youth-gang warfare has extra of the coloration of juvenile delinquency than of antisemitism.”
Boston’s police commissioner additionally denied that the difficulty was racial or non secular. After the Halloween debacle, he advised Anti-Defamation League representatives that “vandalism and hoodlumism” had been accountable for the affronts.
The Jewish response
Boston’s Jewish Neighborhood Council insisted that “deep-seated antisemitic” attitudes had been in charge. Nationally, the Jewish press condemned the Boston police for its incapacity to “address organized child pogroms.”
Jews drew connections between Christian youth gangs, the antisemitic and massively common radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and his followers within the extremist militia group the Christian Entrance. Between the Nineteen Thirties and Nineteen Forties, Coughlin preached anti-Jewish conspiracies to 30 million listeners every week, whereas his admirers within the Christian Entrance assaulted Jews in giant cities, together with Boston.
Jewish and anti-fascist activists urged residents to acknowledge the importance of ideological hatred in youth gangs. They argued that attributing violence towards Jews to youthful delinquency sidestepped the true difficulty of antisemitism.
In early November 1950, the Anti-Defamation League lastly satisfied Boston’s police commissioner that the Hecht Home assaults had been the results of “organized bigotry.”
The flare-ups in Boston peaked on a very frightful Halloween in 1950 and exemplify not solely the brutality of antisemitism however the harms of its trivialization by authorities who downplay claims of antisemitism.
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