2 Skinheads Sought in Attack on 3 Jewish Boys

Police investigators are looking for skinheads suspected of attacking three Jewish teenagers in a West Los Angeles neighborhood last weekend.

The 17-year-old boys, all wearing yarmulkes, were walking home from a friend’s house at 12:30 a.m. Saturday when two men with closely shaved heads approached them near Reeves and Cashio streets in Beverlywood.

“For no other reason than that they were Jews, one of the men punched one of the boys,” Deputy Chief David Kalish said.

The attackers knocked two of the boys to the ground and continued kicking and punching them, Kalish said. The men reportedly shouted anti-Semitic slurs, including “Heil Hitler,” before fleeing in a dark-colored car with two other people.

Two of the teenagers were “beaten pretty badly,” suffering cuts and bruises on their faces and necks, Kalish said. One needed several stitches above an eye. The third boy was unhurt.

At a news conference Tuesday in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of about 1,400 families, Kalish said the incident is a “top priority” for the department.

Last year, 28 of 97 hate crimes in West Los Angeles were directed at Jews.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Tuesday that it was no coincidence that the hate crime occurred two days before Yom Hoshoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The recent proliferation of hate propaganda on the Internet and elsewhere has linked American white supremacist groups with terrorist organizations abroad in what Cooper described as “a convergence of ideologies, a transnational hate.”