Gun battle between Newark police and Jewish police

The Gun battle between Newark police and Jewish police is a late-night confrontation that turns the Roth family’s fear of an anti-Jewish pogrom into a different, but no less consequential, crisis. After gunfire broke out near their home on Chancellor Avenue, the family took refuge in the Wishnows’ former apartment. They learned at dawn that the clash had been between Newark police and the Jewish police of Newark, not between police and an antisemitic mob. The distinction altered what had happened, but not the family’s sense that ordinary life in Newark was no longer secure.

Background and Community Preparations

Walter Winchell’s campaign against Lindbergh’s government had carried him from New York into other cities, where his appearances could attract hostility and violence. After rioting in Detroit, Newark’s Jewish community feared that similar attacks might reach a city where a large Jewish neighborhood lay beside working-class Irish, Italian, German, and Slavic communities that included antisemitic bigots. Some fifty thousand Jews lived in Newark, a city of well over half a million. The fear was not limited to a possible visit by Winchell: people worried that the violence might spread even without one.

Rabbi Prinz and five other prominent Newark Jews, including Meyer Ellenstein, formed the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. The committee sought contingency plans from city and state authorities, meeting with officials responsible for police, fire, and public safety, as well as with the governor, state police superintendent, and National Guard commander. Attorney General Wilentz assured the committee that assaults on Newark Jews would be prosecuted. When the group asked Rabbi Bengelsdorf for a meeting in Washington, he replied that the matter was local rather than federal and directed them back to municipal and state authorities.

Longy Zwillman pursued a separate form of preparation. Concerned that local police might fail to protect the Jewish community, he assigned Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit young men for a volunteer corps called the Provisional Jewish Police. Its members were posted at neighborhood corners and urged local people to keep baseball bats ready in case they were summoned. The competing preparations—official contingency planning and an improvised neighborhood force—formed the immediate background to the gunfire.

The Shooting and Its Discovery

The shots came after Mr. Cucuzza had helped Herman Roth return from the hospital to the family’s damaged apartment. As the firing, shouting, and sirens began, Mr. Cucuzza hurried back inside. Philip Roth was too frightened to walk, and Herman carried him downstairs; Bess Roth was led from the apartment as the family took cover in the Wishnows’ old flat. They remained there through the night, while the gunfire lasted less than an hour.

They did not learn what had happened until dawn, when Mr. Cucuzza ventured toward the area cordoned off on Chancellor Avenue. The discovery reversed the family’s immediate assumption: there had been no pogrom in Newark that night, but a shootout between city police and the Jewish police. The scene had sounded like the anticipated assault on the neighborhood; its actual participants belonged to opposing local forces.

Cause, Casualties, and Public Account

Three members of the Jewish police were killed: Duke Glick, Big Gerry, and Bullet Apfelbaum. The police commissioner told the Newark Evening News that the vigilantes had opened fire without provocation on two foot patrolmen shortly before midnight. Neighbors did not take that explanation seriously. The narrator presents the deaths amid competing interpretations: the men were Jewish, but they were also described as dangerous figures whom respectable residents would not have asked to protect them.

The account further suggests that the new mayor wanted the men off the streets and intended to signal that Longy Zwillman no longer enjoyed the standing he was rumored to have held under the previous administration. Uncle Monty remarked that the dead men’s Jewish identity had not been irrelevant, even if their conduct and local politics also shaped the confrontation. The narrative therefore resists reducing the shooting to a single explanation: it was neither the feared pogrom nor a politically neutral encounter.

Aftermath and Significance

The absence of an anti-Jewish mob that night did not restore the Roth family’s security. At seven the next morning, Herman called Shepsie Tirschwell in Winnipeg and admitted that he had been wrong about the danger and that Bess and the Tirschwells had been right. Newark had not yet forced a Jewish family to relocate, and Rabbi Prinz’s standing had helped influence local authorities, but Herman could no longer bear not knowing what might happen the next day. The family began making arrangements to emigrate to Canada.

The gun battle’s importance lies in the gap between what the family feared and what the facts disclosed. It was not the pogrom they had expected, yet it occurred amid rising antisemitism, armed neighborhood preparations, and uncertainty about whether public authorities would protect them. The clarification did not cancel the fear; it became part of the evidence that finally moved Herman from anxious resistance to departure.