At Brown University, administrators are determining whether to discipline 17 Jewish students who were found sleeping in a temporary structure as a part of a Jewish holiday on campus early on Tuesday morning.
The students, who are members of an unofficial campus group called Jews for Ceasefire Now, say their religion commands them to sleep in the structure, called a sukkah, during Sukkot. They say the school is unfairly cracking down on them because of their anti-Zionist stance. But the school says it has strict and long-standing policies about students sleeping on university green spaces.
Simon Aron is a freshman at Brown University who is new to the group. At around 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, he said, he was startled awake while in the sukkah.
“I was woken up by Brown’s campus police shining lights in my eyes,” he said.
The university had informed students at the start of the holiday that they were allowed to construct the sukkah, but that they could not sleep in it.
According to a rabbi affiliated with the school’s office of chaplains and religious life, Lex Rofeberg, it is commanded in the Torah to dwell in sukkahs during Sukkot in honor of the Israelites wandering through the desert after escaping from Egypt.
“Rabbis, for thousands of years have been asking, ‘What does it mean to dwell?’ And they’ve determined that what it means to dwell is sort of to do your main daily activities there,” said Rofeberg. “And the two biggest main daily activities that we all tend to do most days are eating and sleeping.”
Rofeberg says that even observant Jews who don’t take the commandment literally see sleeping in a sukkah to be a mitzvah, or a praiseworthy act.
“And so the fact that the university would not permit students to do so does open serious questions about the ability of students to practice Judaism on campus,” Rofeberg said.
Over email, a spokesperson for Brown said that the school has a decade-old policy about not sleeping on campus green spaces.
“Students have erected a sukkah in many other years, but the University has provided no exceptions for sleeping in those cases or any other,” the spokesperson, Brian Clark, said.
The university also said the request it received and approved for the students to build a sukkah did not contain language about the students sleeping in the sukkah, although an email shared with The Public’s Radio shows students made reference to overnight stays in their request to the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life on Oct. 11.
“The practice for a sukkot is to spend as much time as you can in the sukkah especially including meals and nights,” the email said.
Edie Fine, a senior at Brown, also said they believed the University cracked down because the sukkah is emblazoned with signs of Gaza solidarity, and faces the building that holds president Christina Paxson’s office.
“We put up these beautiful, ginormous walls that say ‘Gaza solidarity.’ And we’ve thrown up the Palestinian flag and all of our beautiful posters,” they said. “I think it became clear that it was a political statement that threatened the dominant narrative of what Jewishness is, and that scared them.”
Rabbi Rofeberg said he had slept in a sukkah on campus at Brown, but it was prior to Brown’s policy about not sleeping on campus green spaces. But Rofeberg says sleeping in sukkahs on campuses is common around the country.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the students said they had not yet decided whether they will once again sleep in the sukkah on Tuesday night. Sukkot ends at sundown on Wednesday.
