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Several Jewish-led student groups are marking the holiday of Sukkot on campuses across the country by constructing small, temporary structures called sukkahs and adorning them with messages of solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s genocide.
Sukkot, sometimes known as the Feast of Booths, is a weeklong Jewish holiday commemorating the story of the 40 years that Israelites spent in the wilderness after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt. Jewish people often celebrate Sukkot by constructing sukkahs, which are reminiscent of the shelters their ancestors lived in during displacement.
Sukkot began at sunset on Wednesday, and will last through this coming Wednesday, October 23.
Jewish students at campuses across the U.S. are using the occasion to call for their institutions to divest from Israel and for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel — with many noting that the holiday has increased resonance this year as millions of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced and now live in tents due to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
Around 18 college chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have set up sukkahs at colleges and universities across the country. Other Jewish students and groups have also taken part in the demonstrations.
Many of the sukkahs feature both Jewish and Palestinian imagery, including olive trees. The structures are also marked with messages like “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” and “Stop Arming Israel.” At the sukkahs, students have hosted teach-ins featuring university faculty, JVP said in a press release shared with Truthout.
The construction of sukkahs on university campuses has been met with varying responses from administrators.
At Brown University, for example, the student group Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) received permit approval for the temporary construction of their sukkah, with the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life allowing it to stand during the weeklong holiday.
Still, leaders from JFCN said that university officials must do more to address U.S. complicity in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“It is important to take up space on this campus and show that the undemocratic Corporation” — the formal name given to the governing body of Brown University — “will not silence the student movement,” Rafi Ash, a member of JFCN, told The Brown Daily Herald. “We want to show the Corporation that as they arrive on campus, they are working against the student body.”
Not all universities were receptive to the construction of sukkahs on their grounds. Northwestern University, for example, ordered employees, accompanied by police, to tear down students’ Gaza solidarity sukkah.
As the religious structure was being torn down, the Northwestern students who had constructed it read a poem out loud, observing the symbolism of the university destroying their sukkah that was calling for Palestinian liberation.
“We asked if we could stay on this lawn, as we are students of this campus and have every right to be here. So we stayed and watched the police tear down the beautiful structure that we built only hours ago,” student Isabelle Butera said.
At the University of California-Berkeley, administrators ordered another sukkah to be torn down. Jewish students condemned the action, with some saying it demonstrated the university-wide sentiment against anti-Zionist Jews on campus.
The students relocated their sukkah to a different location, where a guest lecturer spoke. However, the next morning, the university called the police and again tore the structure down, removing materials from it, including items donated by community farms.
“They don’t see us as real Jews or make claims that we’re self hating Jews because we refuse to support a genocide and the colonization of Indigenous Palestinians,” said Gus, who participated in building the sukkah at Berkeley. “Then, when we try to make our own space on the campus that we pay for, our administration destroys our religious dwelling not once, but twice. Both times accompanied by a swarm of police.”
“At Brown, we are unequivocally in solidarity with Northwestern, Cornell, Columbia, and all other Jewish and non-Jewish organizers who are facing repression for pro-Palestinian activism, whether right now in their sukkahs, on their campuses, or throughout the entirety of the past year,” Eden Fine, a participant in the Sukkot event and a senior at Brown University, said in a statement to Truthout.
A pro-Palestinian sukkah was also torn down by officials at the University of Washington.
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