To Probe Boston Hockey Team’s Baiting of League’s Only Jewish Player

Clarence Campbell, president of the National Hockey League, said today that he would go ahead with an investigation of the clash between Larry Zeidel, the only Jewish player in the League, and a member of the Boston Bruins here last week which Zeidel said was provoked by anti-Semitic slurs from the Bruins. One remark purportedly involved a reference to the “gas chambers.”

Campbell said that he felt the investigation was necessary because the incident had brought a “slur” against professional hockey. Zeidel said today that he considered the matter closed. He and Eddie Stack of the Bruins were given penalty suspensions after a brawl in the Maple Leaf Gardens during a Flyers-Bruin game. Initially, Zeidel said he would protest the four-game suspension penalty he received Shack was given a three-game suspension penalty.

Zeidel said after the incident that he had gone out of his way all season “to turn the other cheek” but that the anti-Semitic slurs had finally provoked him beyond control. “When they say ‘Jew boy’ and ‘You’re the next for the gas ovens,’ they’re on sensitive grounds,” the 19-year-hockey veteran said, disclosing that his grandparents had been murdered in Nazi death camps.

Declaring that “I can’t live with myself listening to that abuse,” Zeidel reported that several Bruins had taunted him during the game last week but he emphasized that Shack was not one of them. He said he had been told by some former Bruin players that a number of Bruin players were “out to get him.” In earlier incidents, he managed to hold his temper, he said. “All the time I told myself that I have to keep cool,” he said, “but when Shack kept running at me, the Bruin bench would say ‘shove it down the Jew boy’s throat’ and ‘Jew boy – we’re going to put you in the gas chambers.’ I didn’t want to get into any trouble but it just went too far.”

In New York, the American Jewish Committee called for apologies to Zeidel. Acknowledging that “we don’t expect Garden Club language at a hockey game,” Nathan Perlmutter, the committee’s director of domestic affairs, added that “a full apology to Zeidel and to the millions of Jews and non-Jews who were brutally murdered by the Nazis is in order.”