Hitler photo appears in school yearbook
Paramus district collects all copies and will reprint them
The students at East Brook Middle School in Paramus got their yearbooks as the school year ended, featuring photographs of graduating eighth graders, and began the beloved ritual of figuring out something funny or pithy or at least very short to write in their friends’ books — when all of a sudden they all had to turn them in.
One of the features of East Brook’s yearbook is that graduating students are able to send in baby pictures of themselves. They’re unidentified — presumably part of the fun is figuring out who’s who.
This year, though, it all went bad.
Someone realized that among the full-color pictures of kids born in 2012 and 2013 was a black-and-white image of … who?
Adolf Hitler.
To be clear, the photo is not easily identifiable. It doesn’t have a toothbrush mustache. There is no sign of the extraordinary evil that child would go on to do. The black-and-white, formally posed photo is odd and entirely out of place — by now, though, we all know that photos can be photoshopped, or even created out of whole cloth by AI. But online research seems to show that this either really is or at the very least has been assumed to be a picture of the Nazi monster.
The school immediately collected all the yearbooks. They will be reprinted and the new ones will be redistributed.
Local officials responded with somber distaste.
The school’s principal, Ryan Aupperlee, wrote an email that said “The presence of this image is unacceptable. Even if the image was not immediately recognizable to those paging through the book, its inclusion in an official school publication is a severe breach of our values.”
Hitler, he continued, embodies “hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust, including the murder of six million Jews.” His photograph “has no place in a yearbook created for our students.”
Paramus’s mayor, Chris DiPiazza, wrote about the yearbook in Facebook. “Our borough’s strength has always been because we are a town welcoming to all faiths and home to numerous houses of worship,” he wrote.
Jason Shames is the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey.
“We are grateful to Principal Ryan Aupperlee and Superintendent Sean Adams for responding quickly, communicating openly with families, immediately contacting law enforcement, and taking the appropriate steps to address this deeply troubling incident,” he wrote in an email. “Their actions demonstrated the kind of leadership our communities expect when confronted with hate and sent a clear message that antisemitism has no place in our schools or our society. Incidents like this remind us that antisemitism is not confined to history books. Education, vigilance, and moral leadership remain essential. We hope this difficult moment becomes an opportunity for meaningful learning and reinforces the responsibility we all have to confront hate whenever and wherever it appears.”
According to NBC 4 New York, the Bergen County prosecutor’s office investigated and decided that putting the photo in the yearbook was a “bias incident” but did not rise to the level of “bias crime.”
Apparently officials have identified the student who sent the photo to the yearbook; the student is a minor so must remain unnamed. But a parent, speaking anonymously, said that the student has been in trouble before.
Arthur Weiner, the rabbi of the Congregation Beth Tikvah in Paramus, a Conservative shul, said that he was first alerted to the yearbook by a congregant whose child attends the school. He sent a letter to congregants saying that he was “angered by this blatant antisemitic incident” and had been in contact with the school district and local elected leaders about their response.
“Events like these are of great concern to us both personally and as a community,” Rabbi Weiner wrote. “Incidents involving Nazi imagery or references to Hitler are not merely offensive. They touch deep historical wounds and remind us why vigilance remains so important.” The local Jewish community could “take heart in the reaction of the authorities to this particular event.”
“We have not always seen that clear and unambiguous response from school districts when similar incidents of antisemitism and bias have occurred,” Rabbi Weiner said in an interview. “I think we’ve been very, very proud of the response.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein of Congregation Beth Tefillah, a modern Orthodox shul in town, said that while many parents at his congregation had expressed “frustration,” “hurt,” and “concern” over the incident, they also felt “supported by the local government.”
Rabbi Goldstein said that still he does “not feel that there’s nearly enough proactive measures in the local school systems.
“These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” he said. “They happen because someone is taught at home on social media or informally amongst peers at schools, that it is okay to hurt Jewish people, that has to be made clear, that that is unacceptable.”
Grace Gilson of JTA contributed to this report.