On a chilly Halloween night in late October 1950, dozens of Jewish teenagers and their friends gathered for merriment in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester at the Hecht House, a Jewish community center that provided job training and hosted social events. While there, they celebrated the holiday with dancing, cake and ice cream.
Then, terror approached.
Motivated by antisemitism, neighborhood teens launched a brutal attack on the premises of Hecht House that left many of the young Jews at the party injured and some hospitalized. The attackers faced no repercussions.
The assaults at Hecht House sparked community conversations about anti-Jewish violence and its minimization by local authorities, themes that resonate today given the rising numbers of antisemitic hate crimes.
Details of the Hecht House attacks remain overlooked in historical analyses about antisemitism, where outbursts like these are often discounted as sporadic or insignificant.
Yet the incident – and what led up to it and its subsequent fallout – underscore the importance of taking antisemitic extremism seriously.
Origins of violence
My research on the history of antisemitic radicalism in America led me to the papers of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism and extremism, where I learned about the Hecht House attacks.
The trouble started months before the attacks, when non-Jewish teens began assaulting Jews throughout Boston, a prominent destination for Jewish people displaced by World War II.
Coupled with longtime antisemitic myths, the presence of these Jewish teens, called “foreigners” by some white Bostonians, spelled disaster for some members of Boston’s Jewish community. As I learned further in my research, new immigrants were not the only Jews to suffer violence throughout the 1950s.
Youth gangs roamed the streets shouting regularly, “Come on out you dirty Jews, we’re going to stone and kill you!”
In one incident, a group attacked a disabled Jewish war veteran incapable of defending himself. In another, they beat a Jewish refugee boy whose parents had perished in a Nazi concentration camp.
In comments to local newspapers and official reports, Boston police downplayed such attacks as symptoms of “juvenile delinquency,” blaming bad parenting and teenage mischief rather than a toxic ideology.
When the Jewish Community Council of Boston complained to authorities about the wave of youth violence, officials responded with indifference, if not outright disdain.
“Kids have always called each other names and fought,” said one official to local Jewish leaders. According to the Jewish Community Council’s records, another common response was that the Jews were “just trying to stir up trouble,” reading “prejudice into fist fights.”
Halloween at Hecht House
Days before the Halloween attack, drunken teens broke into Hecht House and spouted antisemitic slurs. A fight erupted with Jewish residents, who kicked them out.
But the drunken teens promised to eventually return and “clean up the Jews.”
At the house, a Jewish boy soon discovered a note warning that “Hecht House Jews” had better “watch out.” The Anti-Defamation League collected the facts of the encounter from the Jews involved.
When the Halloween attack finally happened, between 1,500 and 2,000 spectators gathered close to Hecht House, hoping to catch a glimpse of the action.
The first victim, David Sault, was a Christian friend of the Jewish residents. He tried to enter the house through a back 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.”
On a chilly Halloween night in late October 1950, dozens of Jewish teenagers and their friends gathered for merriment in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester at the Hecht House, a Jewish community center that provided job training and hosted social events. While there, they celebrated the holiday with dancing, cake and ice cream.
Then, terror approached.
Motivated by antisemitism, neighborhood teens launched a brutal attack on the premises of Hecht House that left many of the young Jews at the party injured and some hospitalized. The attackers faced no repercussions.
The assaults at Hecht House sparked community conversations about anti-Jewish violence and its minimization by local authorities, themes that resonate today given the rising numbers of antisemitic hate crimes.
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