Tel Aviv U. Students To Mark ‘Nakba Day’
Students at Tel Aviv University will mark Nakba Day with an approved campus ceremony, despite opposition from campus employees and other students.
The ceremony marking Nakba Day, or Catastrophe Day, which marks the date on the Gregorian calendar when Israel achieved statehood in 1948 and is commemorated with mourning, was scheduled to take place on Monday outside the main gate of the university.
The ceremony is not allowed to be broadcast through a sound system, and organizers had to provide several hundred dollars for six security guards for the event.
The event was scheduled to include an alternative version of Yizkor, the Jewish prayer of mourning. It was also to feature speakers reading the names of pre-1948 Palestinian villages inside what is today Israel, as well as a moment of silence, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Education Minister Gideon Saar on Sunday tried to convince the university to revoke its permission for the event, during a conversation with university President Yossef Kalupter.
“The education minister is of the opinion that the decision is wrong and infuriating,” Saar’s spokesman told Haaretz.
The event was organized by both Jewish and Arab students.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
