New anti-Semitism dispute at Humboldt University: Two student representatives have now resigned from the “Refrat” because they see “persistent anti-Semitism” in the committee. The “Refrat” (short for Speakers Council) is the HU student representative body, which is usually called Asta elsewhere. Those who resigned were responsible for finances in the refraction.
“Over the last few months, the refraction has developed in a direction that we cannot support. While we as elected speakers usually agree that we as an institution fight against all group-related inhumanity, this consensus does not seem to apply to anti-Semitism,” says a resignation letter that is available to the Tagesspiegel and a longer chronicle of the escalation of the events in the refrat is supplemented. The student parliament was informed of this on Monday evening.
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In their letter, the two students make serious allegations against other members of the department. He “actively ensured that Jewish students at the HU and in student body committees no longer feel safe. The referral is not accessible to them,” it continues.
Concerns and complaints from Jewish students are not taken seriously: conversations with the HU’s anti-Semitism officer are dismissed as being “too one-sided,” events critical of anti-Semitism are not given space or not shared publicly despite requests. In the discussion about positioning, the “relevance and existence of anti-Semitism were fundamentally questioned”. The Refrat also works with groups that glorify Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel as a “freedom struggle.”
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The refraction is not safe for Jewish students or for all those people who do work critical of anti-Semitism.
The HU student representatives on the reason for their resignation
According to the students, the final trigger for the resignation was a dispute over an anti-Semitism advice center. This was already decided by the student parliament in 2020, but was never implemented. The finance department made a new attempt in the summer and the position was approved again by the student parliament. An advertisement has been drawn up and job interviews have been scheduled.
But at the end of October, “at the strong insistence of a few speakers,” the department unilaterally canceled the talks “with reference to alleged procedural errors” and withdrew the proceedings from the two finance officers. The finance officers were informed “that the Refrat plenum, which decides on the recruitment, would not agree to any recommendation that we as the application committee would make, regardless of the applicants.” For the two people who resigned, this is “the last border crossing that we were able to experience in this structure”.
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The letter also accuses individual Refrat members of having been “actively” involved in the occupation of the Institute of Social Sciences in May. The report at the time portrayed it as having acted in a “mediation role” between the cast and the university management. However, after a tour of the devastated institute building, they withdrew from it “because of clearly anti-Semitic incidents and the very present Islamist, militaristic and anti-Semitic symbolism,” according to a statement from the department at the time.
“The Speakers’ Council no longer creates a safe space. It is not safe for Jewish students or for all those people who do work critical of anti-Semitism,” the two resigned critics conclude. They would hope that at some point the refraction could once again offer a space of solidarity for critical discussions and community. “But we no longer have the strength in this RefRat to work towards this,” the letter ends.
