Police protection on an around-the-clock basis was in effect today at a Brooklyn yeshiva where 15 pupils were roughed up yesterday in two unprovoked attacks by Negro teen-agers who first taunted the pupils with anti-Semitic insults.
The attacks, in one of which 50 Negro boys and girls took part, occurred at the United Lubavitcher Yeshivoth Hebrew Grammar High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section, considered one of the worst slum areas in Brooklyn. The first encounter occurred at noontime as some 125 students, aged six to 11, stood outside the school during their lunch hour.
The Negroes, some carrying sticks, bottles, knives and at least one bicycle chain, came into the street and began shouting epithets at the children and jeering them with such calls as “You don’t belong in this country.” Rabbi Abraham Barnitsky, a teacher, went to the aid of the pupils and was kicked and knocked to the ground. As pupils went to his aid and the fighting spread, many of the children were cut and bruised.
The first clash ended when Leo Berkman, a city building inspector, stopped his car, jumped out and grabbed one of the assailants as the others fled. Berkman made a citizen’s arrest of Bernard Lane, 15, who was held overnight in Manhattan youth house for arraignment in Brooklyn Children’s Court on third degree assault charges. Later in the afternoon, ten Negro youths came to the school and assaulted Samuel Lipsker, 10, and then ran off.
Rabbi Samuel Schrage, the principal, said Rabbi Isidore Kolodny, an instructor, also was injured in the first clash. Rabbi Schrage reported today that one police officer had been placed on duty in the school yard and that a police car was on constant patrol. He added that everything was “back to normal this morning,” and that there were no absences because of injuries to the pupils.
Rabbi Schrage said there had been repeated incidents in the past but these had stopped after a police patrol was placed at the building at night. He called the two attacks yesterday the worst that had ever happened to the school.
Scores of passersby and bus passengers who alighted when their buses halted because of the fighting watched the attacks with apparent indifference. Except for Berkman, none of those who saw the clashes came to the aid of the pupils. Mr. Berkman promised to press charges against the youth he arrested and said that the indifference of the “100 people who watched without lifting a finger” was “disgraceful.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
