Rabbi at Harvard Claims School is Forcing Jewish Student Group to Lock Up Menorah at Night for Fear of Vandalism

Rabbi at Harvard Claims School is Forcing Jewish Student Group to Lock Up Menorah at Night for Fear of Vandalism

The anti-Israel sentiment at Harvard has gotten so bad that Jewish students are being forced to pack up their campus Menorah each night and lock it away, over fear that it will be vandalized and make the school look bad, according to Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi.

Can you even imagine the uproar at Harvard if gay students were told the same thing about pride flags or if black students were told this about BLM banners? It wouldn’t be tolerated for an instant.

The New York Post reports:

Harvard forces Jewish student group to ‘hide’ menorah at night for fear of vandalism: rabbi

Harvard forces a Jewish student group to hide its menorah each night after its lighting over fears of vandalism that “won’t look good” for the Ivy League school, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad said.

“On our campus in the shadow of Widener Library, we in the Jewish community are instructed, ‘We’ll let you have the menorah, you made your point, OK. Pack it up, don’t leave it out overnight because there will be criminal activity we fear and it won’t look good’,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said at a Hanukkah lighting Wednesday night.

Zarchi, the founder and president of Harvard Chabad, said the university has asked the group to take in the menorah each night since the first Hanukkah lighting on campus.

But amid a rise in antisemitism across the world and on college campuses due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, the rabbi said the message is even more poignant.

“You know when change is gonna happen on this campus? When we don’t have to pack up the menorah,” Zarchi said.

FOX News covered the story this week. Watch:

Rabbi Zarchi gave a speech at Harvard on the seventh night of Hanukkah.

Here’s an excerpt, via Campus Reform:

We’re amongst friends here, a little bit informal, so I’m going to be very, very honest. It’s not been fun for me the last 24 hours. A lot of people are upset with me, so I want to speak to that for a minute. but I will begin by quoting my teacher, Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. I was reviewing his writings recently about this holiday, and I found a note where he writes about the holiday as follows:

“Tonight, we celebrate the seventh day of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. The holiday recalls the victory more than 2100 years ago of a militarily weak, but spiritually strong, Jewish people over a the mighty forces of a ruthless enemy that had overrun the holy land and threatened to engulf its land and its people in darkness. The miraculous victory culminating with the rededication of the sanctuary in Jerusalem and the rekindling of the Menorah, which had been desecrated and extinguished by the enemy, has been celebrated annually ever since during the eight days of Hannukah, and especially by lighting the menorah. The menorah stands as a symbol and a message of triumph of freedom over oppression, of spirit over matter, and of light over darkness.”

It’s a timely and reassuring message, for the forces of darkness are ever-present. Friends, we are gathering at a moment when the eyes of the world are upon us. Everybody’s looking at Harvard now.

And it pains me. It pains me to have to say, sadly, that Jew-hate and anti-Semitism is thriving on this campus. Just last night, when we had the esteemed Professor Steven Pinker kindle the lights of Hanukkah, sharing publicly for the first time in his life about history in his family that he only recently learned– how his family was suffering and tortured in the pogroms of Kishinev, and new information that he learned about his family who were murdered in the Holocaust. While he’s sharing those words here at Harvard Yard, he’s the subject of hateful words, viciously accused and attacked for spreading lies, for sharing fake history.

Featured image via YouTube.

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