A Jewish high school student says he couldn’t believe what was going on when a history teacher in a wealthy Alabama school system had classmates stand and give a stiff-armed Nazi salute during a lesson on the way symbols change.
Once he shared a video and photos of the incident on social media, Ephraim Tytell says, he received a reprimand from school administrators in Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham.
The only Jewish student in the @mtnbrookhs class reported that his teacher instructed his classmates to raise the Nazi salute.
The school’s response? Discipline the student. This absolutely outrageous situation demands a full investigation.https://t.co/bS1zVNo2Uu— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) February 9, 2022
“They proceeded to tell me that I’m making Mountain Brook look bad for uploading the video and sharing it and asked me to apologize to my teacher, which I refused to,” he tells WIAT-TV. “The day after, he made our class, and our class only, put up our phones and he moved me from sitting in the back of the class to right next to him.”
On Tuesday, the school system issued a statement saying the video and photos shared online “are not representative of the lesson” and no one tried to teach students how to do a Nazi salute.
“Understanding the sensitive nature of this subject, Mountain Brook Schools has addressed the instructional strategy used with the teacher and does not condone the modeling of this salute when a picture or video could accurately convey the same message,” the statement said.
