Police investigating threats against Jewish students in Massachusetts school

JTA — Police are investigating reports of threats against Jewish students at a middle school in western Massachusetts.

Officials at Monument Valley Regional Middle School in Great Barrington told parents that there is no credible threat to the Jewish students’ safety, The Berkshire Eagle reported.

“We are very concerned by this and the unfortunate reminder that anti-Semitism and racism remain part of our community in South County and in our school,” Monument Valley principal Ben Doren wrote in an October 31 letter to parents.

It is the second report of anti-Semitism at a Massachusetts middle school in recent weeks.

A student had been telling Jewish students that he was going to “nuke the Jews,” and that “I have a list and you’re on it, and all the other Jewish kids are on it, too,” the newspaper reported, citing the parent of a child in the school. Another parent said students had made Nazi salutes at her child.

Doren told the newspaper that the problem of religious or other bias is being increasingly worked into the curriculum, including expanding study of the Holocaust, race and identity issues, disabilities and civil rights.

The Anti-Defamation League’s A World of Difference Institute program is already active in the school.

A parent told the newspaper that swastikas have been carved in desks and drawn on bathroom walls at the school in recent years.