JNS
“It is 2025 and the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz being liberated, and there is someone Jewish in Ohio, in America, that is scared to walk home,” the student said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Ohio State University senior Adam Kling estimates that he’s seen between 50 and 100 anti-Israel protests on campus in the last four years. But what the Jewish biomedical engineering student experienced on Jan. 27, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was new to him.
On Monday evening, some 60 antisemitic protesters braved near-freezing temperatures to chant and yell outside of the Schottenstein Chabad House at OSU in an effort to disrupt presentations by two former Israeli soldiers about their experiences being injured while responding to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks in southern Israel.
Although the Chabad center bears the public university’s name, it’s not an official Ohio State University entity and its current building is off-campus. Kling told JNS that it was unusual for protesters to target a site that wasn’t on the university grounds.
“It’s one thing to do it on campus. It is a public university, and you have free speech, which I 100% support your right to go out and protest what you believe right on campus,” he said. “This is the first time that they’ve taken the step to go from campus to surrounding us at our own home, a religious building on campus where people are supposed to feel safe.”
Kling told JNS that he is “obviously not a law expert” but is “just struggling to see where the line is when it comes to religious intimidation when you stand outside a religious building and scream threats to all the Jewish people in there, calling them ‘terrorists,’ ‘baby killers’ and ‘war criminals.’”
“We are in Columbus, Ohio, 6,000 miles away from the Middle East,” he said. “I don’t understand how intimidating and threatening me off campus at a Jewish place of worship has anything to do with politics or does anything to support your cause.”
Kling said that a freshman student was scared to leave the building that night and walk home, “because she was worried she was going to be attacked for being Jewish.”
“It is 2025 and the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz being liberated, and there is someone Jewish in Ohio, in America, that is scared to walk home,” he said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
‘Really eye-opening’
The pro-Israel, unofficial campus group Students Supporting Israel hosted the event on Monday evening with the Chabad center and the nonprofit Belev Echad, which supports wounded Israeli soldiers.
Belev Echad brought Maya Desiatnik and Saar Arie—both of whom were injured on Oct. 7—to Ohio to share their stories with Jewish students. Some 130 students attended the event, which ran about an hour.
Ava Klein, an Ohio State freshman who is studying finance and economics, told JNS that the event was an opportunity for students to learn about Israeli soldiers. (Klein is co-president of Students Supporting Israel.)
“I think a lot of people have really crazy misconceptions about the Israel Defense Forces in general and what they stand for and the values that they’re protecting,” she said. “It was really eye opening for people to see that they’re literally kids just like us.”
The Ohio State chapter of Students for Justice In Palestine, an official student group that is listed as active on the public university’s website, organized the protest outside the Chabad, which began about an hour before the event.
Some other schools have banned SJP from their campuses, and lawmakers have launched investigations of the group’s alleged terror ties.
The Ohio State chapter of SJP wrote on social media, in posts promoting the protest, that the two speakers are “war criminals” who are “directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine,” and who have “the blood of countless martyrs” on their hands.
Klein told JNS that the protesters began yelling that “we don’t want Zionists here” in a highly-disruptive manner prior to and during the event.
“I was interested in hearing the soldiers’ stories, but it was hard to focus when all you could hear were the protesters screaming, ‘baby killers’ and ‘Zionist cowards,’” she said.
Though the event wasn’t intended to coincide with International Holocaust Memorial Day, it was a “really powerful connection to have two soldiers, who are dedicating their lives to defending a nation” that was founded “after the liberation from Auschwitz and the Holocaust,” Klein said.
“I think many of the protesters really believe the accusations against the IDF in Israel,” she said. “I think people are upset about it.”
Even though they harbor those antisemitic beliefs, “they have to realize that Palestine is not going to be freed from screaming at the Chabad on the 80th commemoration of the Holocaust,” she said.
Rabbi Zalman Deitsch, who runs the Chabad house, told JNS that the Jewish center hasn’t been protested before.
“Ever since Oct. 7, we have had to have security at the Chabad House for a lot of programs, and every Friday night we have at least one guard,” he said. “Before the event, we spoke to the campus police, and the Columbus city police, who we’ve had a very good relationship with, and they made recommendations for us and sent over three police officers.”
“The protesters were chanting, ‘intifada revolution,’ which is supporting a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel,” he said. “Though they didn’t say directly, “We support genocide,” that is essentially what an intifada is.”
“That is a statement that is basically saying you want to get rid of all the Jews,” he added.
When JNS sought comment from Ohio State, Benjamin Johnson, assistant vice president of media and public relations at the school and its chief spokesman said that “the event you’re referring to did not take place on campus.”
JNS sought further comment from the university about whether students protesting against Jews at an off-campus event on International Holocaust Remembrance Day violates Ohio State’s policies and if the university agrees with its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter calling the Jewish state “apartheid” and calling for boycotts of Israel.
(JNS also sought comment from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, and from Andrew Ginther, a Democrat who is the mayor of Columbus.)
As the antisemitic protesters shouted outside the Chabad event, Jewish students made the best of an uncomfortable situation, according to Deitsch.
“The students’ reaction was, ‘We are proud and no one is going to deter us from showing that we are proud,’” the rabbi said. “They were very uplifted by it, because the message of the soldiers’ speeches was that they were caught in a very harsh situation on Oct 7 but were able to survive and prevail.”
“Even though the students are not exactly facing the same dire situation as soldiers in a warzone, they can relate to that message of choosing to be resilient in the face of hatred,” he added.
