On Oct. 6, the Jewish student group Hillel constructed a college-approved display on the Glade to honor the hostages abducted from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Separately from the Oct. 7 anniversary, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot began on the evening of Oct. 6. The High Holy day is traditionally celebrated with the construction of an outdoor structure called a sukkah. Hillel and the Jewish Student Association (JSA) each constructed a sukkah on campus in observance — Hillel’s on the lawn outside of Fowler, and JSA’s initially in the academic quad before moving behind Fields.
On Oct. 6 and 7, multiple instances of vandalism occurred on the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) academic campus. Most of these incidents were targeting Hillel’s memorial project on the Glade, while one was a separate incident of graffiti on the walls of BoDine that featured language critical of Zionism. The JSA sukkah was not vandalized.
Hillel’s Oct. 7 memorial project, located on the Glade outside of Pamplin, consisted of laminated photos of the 48 hostages who were still being held in Gaza on Oct. 7 2025, after being abducted from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. Each photo was staked into the ground and adorned with a bundle of yellow flowers. Yellow has long symbolized the hope for the safe return of hostages, with yellow ribbon having been a prominent symbol of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and was later adopted by the Hostages and Missing Families forum upon its founding following the Oct. 7 attack. The project was officially approved by the college, as was a similar installation that was put up on Oct. 7 last year. According to Isaac Babus ’26, president of Lewis & Clark’s chapter of Hillel, there were at least three incidents of vandalism against the display.
The incidents sparked concern and discussion across the CAS campus, highlighting tensions around how students express political and religious identity. As the college investigates the vandalism, administrators and student groups have offered differing interpretations of what the events represent.
On the afternoon of Oct. 7, Vice President of Student Life (VPSL) and Dean of Students, Ben Meoz, sent an email to students addressing the events.
“Overnight, an approved student-created memorial project on the subject of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was vandalized, twice. In addition, cleaning staff interrupted three individuals spray-painting the outside walls of a number of CAS academic buildings. The individuals were masked and left the scene without being identified,” the email read.
Speaking on behalf of the college, Director of Public Relations, Lois Leveen, provided a statement to The Mossy Log on Oct. 14 describing the incidents.
According to Leveen, Campus Safety received a call just before 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 6 reporting that a student was pulling the hostage photos out of the ground. A few of the students who put together the display were notified of the incident and arrived on scene, filming the interference with the display. Campus Safety staff spoke to the interfering student and separately spoke with the students who had put up the installation. The installation was restored immediately after the incident.
Babus provided a first-hand account of the vandalism. He said that Hillel members had left the display to attend an event celebrating Sukkot before returning to find the student pulling up the photographs.
“That night, we were also having a Hillel event for the first day of Sukkot. So people got dinner and then some other Hillel members went to go back and check on the memorial, and they saw a student ripping them out of the ground and throwing them down,” Babus said. “[The Hillel members] started recording, and then these students started screaming at them, getting in their face. It was pretty, just generally unacceptable behavior. We called Campus Safety. They got statements from all of us. We put it back up.”
Campus Safety subsequently increased their patrols around the display throughout the night, continuing until the next day. Later that night, at 11 p.m., Campus Safety received a call that the installation had been vandalized a second time in the same manner. Staff arrived and found that some staked materials had been pulled out of the ground, but they did not find anyone at the scene.
At 8:20 a.m. on Oct. 7, an individual identified by Leveen as “Student Life staff” discovered a student covering the images of the hostages on the glade with photos of other individuals. The staff engaged with the student and alerted Campus Safety, and the installation was restored.
According to Babus, Campus Safety staff then remained stationed at the site until the project was formally taken down.
“We had asked for additional security before all the acts of vandalism happened, just because we knew the seventh was coming and we knew students would be probably particularly riled up. Only after all three acts of vandalism, the major ones I’ve spoken about, did they end up putting a Campus Safety officer there throughout the whole day to make sure that students wouldn’t continue vandalizing it,” Babus said.
Babus noted that a Campus Safety officer was also present at a later memorial event, which they appreciated.
The graffiti is considered to be unrelated to the vandalism of Hillel’s display. Photos taken by The Mossy Log show graffiti that reads “Zionism = Zazism (sic).” Around 3:40 a.m., Campus Safety was notified of unusual noise outside by a staff member who was cleaning inside BoDine.
The same worker went outside to discover the graffiti in progress. According to Leveen, Campus Safety responded by searching for the three individuals involved with the vandalism, but was unable to identify them.
A few days later, on Oct. 12, Associate Professor of English Lyell Asher sent an email about the vandalism to President Robin Holmes-Sullivan, copying the cas-forum@lclark.edu list serve, a list serve where faculty and staff can exchange information unrelated to college business.
“In my many years at the College, this is easily the most brazen and morally repugnant display of intolerance and hatred that I know of, and yet your administration’s response was to have the Dean of Students send a strongly worded letter of disapproval to the College’s undergraduate population only. Six days have passed, and the campus community as whole has heard nothing from the College’s president,” Asher wrote.
On Oct. 6, JSA constructed a sukkah in celebration of Sukkot on the academic quad between J.R. Howard and BoDine. The sukkah, which was approved by the college, was built around a canopy, using parts of a broken tent and other materials. Outside, a Palestinian flag was draped over the front, and a sign read “JSA Solidarity Sukkah.”
JSA leaders Blaise Harrison ’26 and Eldridge Orum ’27 explained the reasoning behind their sukkah to The Mossy Log.
“(Sukkot) is really about the experience of dwelling in nature and eating in nature and basically centers around living in a tent that is exposed to the elements. And given that happening on Oct. 7th, which is the two-year anniversary of the start of the current genocide in Gaza, it felt very hard not to try to make the connection between the religious act of choosing to live in a tent and the people who are forced to live in tents, if they can even access them, in Gaza,” Orum said.
When asked for their thoughts on the incidents of vandalism, Orum noted the contrasting but equally intense reactions from some students.
“Everyone is waking up in the morning and walking by a Hillel installation on the Glade that brings up a lot of emotions for folks. If they’re in alignment with it, they’re like, ‘Wow, this is really sad. This is a memorial. It’s really intense,’” Orum said. “And if they’re not, they’re like, ‘This is minimizing the suffering of hundreds of thousands of other people.’ And so there was already a lot of charged emotion.”
The two JSA leaders mentioned their group took issue with the phrasing of Meoz’s email.
“People in our group disagreed that the writing of the vandalism should have been talked about from the VPSL as something that was in the broader context of antisemitism,” Harrison said.
Harrison emphasized that, as a Jewish student group, JSA believed there was more nuance to whether the graffiti could be viewed as antisemitic than the email indicated.
“We’re here as JSA and we have the ability and the power to speak up through something that is organizationally recognized to say, ‘Actually, this is the definition of antisemitism,’ that it’s important for us to define it and de-homogenize other people’s view of the Jewish opinion on campus. And we felt that the VPSL email had done that — it had homogenized,’” Harrison said.
The incidents on Oct. 6 and 7 have led to continued conversation among students and administration about how to navigate expression and disagreement on campus. According to Leveen, Campus Safety has adjusted its patrols and is continuing its investigation into the vandalism. The college has not released any further updates regarding the incidents.
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