RACES: Jew

In no other place in the world have Jews better reason to feel secure than in Manhattan. There every fourth person is a Jew. In the veins of the State’s Governor, the city’s mayor, the borough’s president runs Jewish blood. There live the wealthiest, the mightiest, the most respected of all Jewry.

Nonetheless, many a Manhattan Jew was troubled last week when he closed his shop for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In the last fortnight a handful of Jews in the German district of Yorkville had reported defacement of their store windows. And week ago the Jewish owners of a German cinema in the same section had found four dread swastikas scratched in their box-office windows.

From sundown to sundown the devout turned their talus-wrapped shoulders and bowed heads toward the East in dutiful prayer. Then, as the ram’s horn sounded Yom Kippur’s end, Yorkville Jews scurried back to their stores for reassurance. On the front windows of more than 50 of them they found scratched in six-inch letters the word “JEW.”