Teacher To 10-Year-Olds: Hurry Up Or I’ll Ship You To Gas Chambers
Image by skynesher/iStock
By Aiden Pink October 16, 2019
A substitute teacher at an elementary school in a suburb of London told a class of 10- and 11-year-olds that they had “better finish off your work quick, or I’ll ship you all off to the gas chambers,” the Jewish Chronicle reported Wednesday.
The comment was allegedly made on Thursday in a French class at Newberries Primary School in Radlett, a suburb that is around one-third Jewish. One WhatsApp message in a conversation between parents in the class that was seen by the Chronicle claimed that there was a “high Jewish concentration of kids in the class.” Another message claimed that a student confronted the teacher, who tried to apologize.
Some parents had threatened to withdraw their children from the school unless action was taken, the Chronicle reported.
“We can confirm that last week we were made aware that an alleged racist comment had been made by an agency teacher working within the school,” the school said in a statement. “We acted on this immediately and our governors and leadership team are undertaking a full investigation. The agency teacher will not be returning.”
The school also said they “are doing everything we can to embrace and celebrate diversity,” and would continue their practice of bringing in different religious group leaders to speak to students.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
