#schottenstein chabad house

[eretzyisrael]

by Vita Fellig

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 terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Although the Jewish 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.”

“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.”