PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — Members of BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now slept in their Gaza solidarity sukkah on Oct. 20 to celebrate Jewish law and respond to Brown University’s vote to reject divestment. Simon Aron, a freshman at Brown University, participating in the sleep-in, said, “We are commanded to put up a tent structure that we spend as much time as possible that we are also supposed to sleep in, according to Jewish tradition and Jewish law.” Since Oct. 16, students at the university built a Gaza-solidarity sukkah, which is a temporary structure built celebrating the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. “Last night, 18 of us decided that we would not be bullied by the administration’s threats. We decided we would sleep in the sukkah. We sang songs, we prayed,” Aron said. Brown University informed ABC 6 News that students were given permission to set up the structure on the green, but the request did not indicate plans for sleeping in the structure. “There could be consequences,” Aron said. “But the 18 of us that slept here last night understand that what we are doing is important.” The university responded with a statement: A group of students, with permission from the University, erected a sukkah — a temporary structure built for use during the weeklong celebration of the Jewish festival of Sukkot — on Brown’s Quiet Green. (A different campus organization erected a second sukkah on Wriston Quad). The request to reserve space on the University’s green spaces indicated no plans for sleeping in the structures. The approval provided was for the short-term use of space on the green for the sukkah, provided the students did so within the guidelines of Brown policies. Sleeping in the sukkah (or elsewhere on University green spaces) is prohibited per long-standing University policy. University leaders reached out directly to the student leaders to reiterate this, on Thursday, Oct. 17, after comments from students in a student newspaper indicated plans for sleeping in the sukkah. Brown’s green space usage policy is more than a decade old and prohibits any kind of encampment on Brown’s historical greens or residential quadrangles. Students have erected a sukkah in many other years, but the University has provided no exceptions to its policies. Students may have constructed a sukkah on off-campus grounds for the purpose of sleeping, but Brown’s policy applies only on its own campus. According to JFCN, students slept in the sukkah to protest Brown University’s crackdown on students organizing around Palestinian liberation and divestment. “Right now there is a genocide happening in Palestine. 83% of Palestinians are displaced and my Jewish values implore me to fight for those Palestinian people,” Aron said. For one female Providence resident who did not want to appear on camera in fear of retaliation, she felt offended by the sukkah. “To use the Jewish religion in a way that is so negative that it impacts people living in the United States is disgusting to me,” the resident said. “This is about a war happening in the Middle East.” “Obviously I don’t want people to get hurt or killed, but to blame things on Jews, and to have that backlash against us right now where I don’t even feel safe in my hometown wearing my Jewish star and practicing my religion is really sad,” she said. Categories: News, Providence, Rhode Island