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Jewish students, blocked from UCLA campus, file suit against school

Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of the nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said school administrators demonstrated “a profound and illegal failure of leadership.”

UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles. Credit: Michael Gordon/Shutterstock.

The University of California, Los Angeles allegedly allowed pro-Hamas protesters to prevent Jewish students from entering campus this spring, according to a lawsuit.

On Wednesday, three Jewish students—Yitzchok Frankel, Joshua Ghayoum and Eden Shemuelian—filed suit against their school, charging that UCLA had “deteriorated into a hotbed of antisemitism.”

In Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, the students state that “on April 25, 2024, and continuing until May 2, 2024, UCLA allowed a group of activists to set up barricades in the center of campus and establish an encampment that blocked access to critical educational infrastructure on campus.”

The nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represents the students.

“If masked agitators had excluded any other marginalized group at UCLA, Governor Newsom rightly would have sent in the National Guard immediately,” said Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket. “But UCLA instead caved to the antisemitic activists and allowed its Jewish students to be segregated from the heart of their own campus. That is a profound and illegal failure of leadership.”

The online “peace and justice” conversation is to focus on “U.S. militarism and racism” and is listed on the official website of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
“Today, six young Israeli children lost their father to heinous terrorism,” the Israeli government stated. “May his memory be a blessing.”
“Jewish students have been targeted with hate and intimidation in the place they call home while at school,” Hillel Ontario CEO Jay Solomon told JNS.
“He literally just was one of the guys,” YU head coach Elliot Steinmetz told the New York Post.