Newark's Jewish community organizes its defense

Newark’s Jewish community organizes its defense as the threat of anti-Semitic violence moves from distant news to the city’s streets. The response takes two distinct forms: a committee of civic leaders seeks protection through municipal and state authorities, while Longy Zwillman builds a separate volunteer force. Together, these efforts show a community trying to prepare for violence without knowing whether public institutions will protect it—or whether the danger will arrive before those institutions act.

From Winchell’s campaign to Newark’s alarm

The immediate backdrop is Walter Winchell’s campaign against Lindbergh’s political movement. Beginning in New York, Winchell spoke from a wooden soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street, drawing a crowd that grew from hundreds to nearly ten thousand. He then carried his campaign through other boroughs and into Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, speaking outside factories and shipyards as he denounced what he considered the threat of fascism. His campaign was controversial, but its dangers became unmistakable in Boston.

At Perkins Square in South Boston, heckling aimed at Winchell because he was Jewish escalated into a mob. A person carrying a burning cross rushed toward the soapbox, shots were fired into the air, and men with clubs surged forward. Winchell’s bodyguards got him away from the crowd and took him to Carney Hospital. The Boston police did not arrive to assess the scene until an hour after the gunshots. To Newark’s Jewish residents, the episode suggested not only that anti-Semitic hostility could become organized violence, but also that official protection might come too late.

Newark had particular reason to fear that violence could spread. About fifty thousand Jews lived in a city of well over half a million, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood adjoining large Irish, Italian, German, and Slavic working-class communities. Residents anticipated either a visit from Winchell as his campaign returned east or the spillover of riots from other cities. The recent disorder in Detroit heightened the fear that local anti-Semites could be drawn into a destructive mob. The threat was not simply that Winchell might bring danger with him; it was that his presence could become a pretext for violence already waiting to be mobilized.

Civic leaders seek official protection

Almost overnight, Rabbi Prinz and five other prominent Newark Jews established the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. The committee was an improvised civic organization, but its work quickly became a model for similar groups in other large cities. Its members sought contingency plans from the authorities rather than treating the danger as a private matter for individual families to manage.

The committee first met at City Hall with Newark’s police chief, fire chief, and director of public safety. The next day it went to the State House in Trenton to meet the governor, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, and the commanding officer of the New Jersey National Guard. Attorney General David T. Wilentz, an acquaintance of the committee members, also attended. In a bulletin to newspapers in New Jersey, the committee reported his assurance that anyone who assaulted Newark’s Jews would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. These meetings brought municipal and state officials into the community’s preparations, but the assurance offered was one of legal consequences, not a guarantee that violence could be prevented.

The committee’s members represented established civic, professional, charitable, and commercial life. Alongside Rabbi Prinz and former mayor Meyer Ellenstein were Jenny Danzis, an elderly civic leader associated with Newark’s Americanization programs for immigrant children and the wife of a leading surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital; Moses Plaut, a department-store executive and ten-time president of the Broad Street Association; Michael Stavitsky, a prominent property owner and former president of the Newark Conference of Jewish Charities; and Dr. Eugene Parsonette, chief of Beth Israel’s medical staff. Their standing gave the committee access to official channels, and its approach treated community safety as a matter requiring coordinated public preparation.

The committee also telegraphed Lionel Bengelsdorf, asking to meet him in Washington. He replied that the matter was local rather than federal and advised the group to continue addressing city and state officials. His distance from the committee contrasted with the civic leaders’ effort to make the danger a public responsibility. Supporters of Bengelsdorf, meanwhile, praised his private efforts on behalf of Jews they considered innocent victims of Winchell’s provocation. They tended to view the crisis differently from residents of Newark’s Jewish neighborhoods: as an alarm intensified by Winchell, rather than evidence that the wider society’s hostility required a change in policy.

A parallel force takes shape

Longy Zwillman organized a separate response. Although wealthy and influential, he was not recruited into the committee, whose members were among the city’s most prominent civic figures. He was nevertheless deeply concerned that Newark’s Jews might be left without protection if local police and state troopers responded no more effectively than police had in Boston and Detroit. His initiative did not replace the committee’s official meetings; it prepared for the possibility that official cooperation would fail when it was most needed.

Longy assigned his close associate Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit and train a volunteer corps called the Provisional Jewish Police. Its first recruits were young men who had left school without graduating and had long been treated by more respectable families as neighborhood troublemakers. The narrator recalls them by their nicknames and describes their prior reputation for fights and petty disorder. Now, instead of being kept at a distance, they were enlisted as local protectors. That reversal gave the defense force an unsettling character: the community’s guardians were men its parents had hoped their children would avoid.

The volunteers appeared on neighborhood street corners, whistling to signal one another. They told children to keep baseball bats ready in case they were called out during the night, and they went to the neighborhood Y, the ball fields, and local stores to recruit able-bodied men. Their aim was to assemble a squad of three men for each block in an emergency. The guns they carried were revolvers loaned from Bullet Apfelbaum’s collection. The arrangements were practical and immediate—positioning people, establishing signals, and gathering men—yet they also made the fear of attack visible in ordinary neighborhood spaces.

The narrative’s sharpest contrast lies between the committee and Longy’s organization. One sought meetings with public officials and an assurance of prosecution; the other planned for the possibility that police and state forces would not intervene. The two responses were not presented as a single unified body. They represented different resources and different expectations: civic standing and institutional access on one side, local connections and armed readiness on the other. The Provisional Jewish Police’s recruits were described as crude and unreliable, but they were asked to stand watch when the community feared more respectable channels might not be enough.

The limits of reassurance

The defense preparations unfold amid a wider political atmosphere in which the existence and causes of anti-Semitic violence are themselves contested. After riots, law-enforcement agencies in the South and Midwest reportedly blamed Jewish residents, describing them as provocateurs and alleging a conspiracy to undermine national morale. Reports claimed that 97 of the 122 people killed had been identified as Jewish provocateurs. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia publicly rejected this inversion of blame, condemning the conspiracy claims and a newspaper story that revived the blood libel about the kidnapped Lindbergh child. The episode shows how false accusations could accompany violence, assigning responsibility to its victims even as the danger to them increased.

Newark’s preparations therefore carry more weight than a local security plan. The committee’s meetings register an attempt to use law and government against anticipated mob violence; Longy’s volunteers register the fear that law might not arrive in time. Neither effort erases the underlying uncertainty. The city’s residents prepare for a threat they cannot predict, in a political climate where the violence, its perpetrators, and even the identity of its victims may be misrepresented. Their defense is an uneasy combination of civic appeal and neighborhood self-protection, shaped by the growing gap between the promise of public order and the fear of being left to face a mob alone.