H (for Hebrew)

Gwynn's Falls Park Junior High School, in Baltimore, has 2,500 students, of whom 50% are German, 30% Jewish. Recently its teachers noticed that a group of boys had taken to signing swastikas to notes passed around the classrooms. They shrugged, wondered what boys would think of to do next. Last week they learned.

During a baseball game in the school yard one day, some 40 boys with swastikas inked on their bare arms, gathered around Melvin Bridge, 14.

"Are you a Jew?" barked one.

"Yes," quavered Melvin Bridge.

"Why are you a Jew?"

No answer.

Thereupon the 40 fell upon Melvin Bridge, inked a swastika on his forehead and scratched the letter H (for Hebrew) on his neck.

When Bridge returned to school the following Monday, he came with a bodyguard, a seaman friend named Morton Rosen, 19. Also tagging along were some 30 boys, mostly Jewish, from Baltimore's City College (a senior high school). Outside the school they met Melvin Bridge's tormentors. Words flew, then fists. Into the fight leaped two teachers, one with a baseball bat, which he swung at Bridge's bodyguard. Police quickly squelched the battle, arrested Bodyguard Rosen.

School officials promptly suspended 18 of Melvin Bridge's assailants, four of his avengers. A grand jury found Rosen guiltless, let him go. Baltimore's School Board started an investigation of anti-Semitic activities in Baltimore's schools; Jewish David Emrich Weglein, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and a 'group of prominent Jewish citizens followed suit.

Meanwhile, in Houston, Tex. Representative Martin Dies said his Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities had information that indicated a "widespread secret anti-Semitic organization" in the nation's schools.

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