Illustrative School buses. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

Law enforcement officials in Essex County, Massachusetts, have launched an investigation into an antisemitic graffiti incident at Beverly Middle School, where school officials said a message praising Adolf Hitler was discovered earlier this week.

According to local media reports, Beverly Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Peter K. Cushing said the graffiti may have been connected to a recent classroom unit on Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of his imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Cushing said the incident presented an opportunity for more education about the dangers and consequences of hate speech.

“We have an obligation to help those students who have perpetrated these acts understand the history, impact, and consequences of hate speech,” he told CBS News.

The local teachers’ union said the district has seen multiple incidents of antisemitic graffiti and called on Beverly Public Schools to review its safety and conduct policies.

“Every person deserves to work and learn in an environment free from intimidation, harassment, and hate,” union officials told CBS.

The Beverly Middle School handbook says students who deface or vandalize school property with graffiti can face disciplinary consequences, including suspension or expulsion. Incidents involving hate speech may also trigger a civil rights investigation and referral to law enforcement.

Essex County law enforcement officials have asked members of the community to provide any information that could help identify those responsible.

The Beverly incident was not the only antisemitic episode reported at a K-12 school in recent days. In western Pennsylvania, administrators at Franklin Regional Senior High School apologized after a student submitted a yearbook quote promoting Holocaust denial.

The student included the phrase “271k or not enough,” a slogan used in neo-Nazi circles to minimize the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has explained that the false “271k” figure stems from a discredited claim that the Red Cross possessed documents showing that Nazi Germany murdered no more than 300,000 European Jews.

Approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased sharply in recent years, according to data compiled by the ADL. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, including vandalism and assault. The group recorded 825 antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools in 2025.

The problem has prompted civil rights complaints and lawsuits while drawing growing attention from Jewish advocacy groups.

In May, the Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Bay Area settled a lawsuit accusing district officials, faculty, and staff of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment that intensified after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

Meanwhile, in the Berkeley Unified School District, also in California, teachers have been accused of using classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes about Israel, including claims that the Jewish state is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing genocide against Palestinians.

“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of End Jew Hatred and The Lawfare Project, told The Algemeiner in a September interview. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.