U-C Jews for Ceasefire held a Seder at the University YMCA Friday. They held the event in collaboration with the RSO Interfaith In Action, a campus-based social justice group revived in 2023.
UCJFC is a group that works out of the Champaign-Urbana community, consisting of multiple generations of Jewish community members from various backgrounds. According to its website, it “… (brings) together Jews and allies from all backgrounds to fight oppression through action, learning and reflection.”
A traditional Seder is a ritual meal eaten at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. This meal, catered by the Muslim-owned-and-operated restaurant Shawarma Joint, was advertised as a “Solidarity Seder.” UCJFC organizer Zev Alexander described it as less-traditional and exemplified the partnership between UCJFC and Interfaith In Action as an instance of the solidarity they sought to involve.
“There’s that on-campus-off-campus solidarity,” Alexander said. “… (That’s) kind of the theme that we wanted to pull out from the ritual text to really think about, like ‘What does it mean for us to stand side by side in solidarity with each other, whether that’s across religion, across aspects of town?’”
The theme of liberation underpins a traditional Seder, symbolized by the retelling of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. The solidarity event featured a convergence of Judaic, Islamic and Christian teachings in addition to the ritual elements which date back to the first century.
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“We want to make sure that we’re talking about different liberation, including Palestinian liberation,” said Lily Rybka, senior in Information Sciences who established the partnership between Interfaith In Action and UCJFC during the 2024 encampment on the Main Quad. “Our liberation is intertwined … all different groups of people, we can’t have one without the other.”
The ritual began with a land acknowledgment, followed by reading aloud from the collectively authored Haggadah, a book which established the Seder’s order of events, before dinner was served. The almost four dozen attendees were each allowed to participate in the reading of alternating lines punctuated by guided rituals.
The Haggadah used reflected the progressive ideals of the involved organizations. Along with more traditional sentiments, the questions and statements in it involved discussions of current conflicts, specifically the closing of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a consequence of the war with Iran.
Readers explored ideas relating to Jewish identity in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, referring to the creation of an ethnostate as a reversal of roles and reading symbolic questions from the Haggadah, including “Who is truly welcome at our table, who is missing and why?”
Autumn Cook, a graduate student studying chemistry at the University, discussed the significance of this type of solidarity within the campus community. Cook described difficulties finding like-minded people in Illini Hillel and Chabad, two Jewish community centers on campus.
“It is sometimes very hard to find community amongst other Jews that are anti-Zionist,” Cook said. “In my own opinion of how I see myself as a Jew and how I see Judaism, what Israel is doing is abhorrent, and I think as Jews, it is our responsibility to speak up against that and to try to strive for the liberation of everyone, especially the Palestinians.”
Overall, the Seder aimed to foster community between those who shared the beliefs of the organizers through its rituals and communal blessings, embodying the interfaith aspect of the event.
“It’s hard to find community,” Cook said. “But we make the community that we can’t find.”
For more information about the issues that UCJFC aims to raise awareness about, visit their resource guide.
