The University of Maryland Student Government Association is set to consider a resolution at the start of Yom Kippur on Wednesday evening calling on the university and its charitable foundation to implement a boycott of companies and academic institutions with ties to “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.”

The final vote “was first set for Rosh Hashanah and now moved to Yom Kippur,” Leo Terrell,  who leads the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, wrote on X. Terrell criticized UMD’s student government for “intentionally picking the holiest days of the year for Jews in order to force them to choose between defending their Zionist identities or observing their religion.” 

UMD has one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country — nearly 20% of the College Park undergraduate student body of more than 30,000 students is Jewish, according to Hillel International.  

When the vote was announced, UMD President Darryll Pines told the university’s newspaper, The Diamondback, that the university supports SGA’s right to debate the issue. But he added that the university wants to ensure the process is “open and fair and has dialogue from all parties of our broad student body.” 

“Resolutions voted on by the Student Government Association are student-led and reflect perspectives of voting members of the SGA,” a university spokesperson told Jewish Insider. “They have no bearing on university policy or practice.” 

Still, Jewish leaders on-campus expressed concern about the vote’s impact on campus climate for Jewish students — especially as it’s being held on a Jewish holiday.   

“Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people, a time of introspection when our students are fasting, and attending prayer services with their community. Holding a vote that seeks to demonize the Jewish homeland on a day when Jewish students will not be able to participate is exclusionary, biased and flat-out wrong,” Rabbi Ari Israel, executive director of UMD Hillel, told JI. 

“I am deeply disappointed that SGA decided to hold a BDS vote on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people,” Einav Tsach, a senior studying journalism and business who formerly led Mishelanu, an on-campus Israeli-American cultural association, told JI. “This strategy underscores the true intention of the BDS campaign: to divide our campus community and exclude Jewish students from a vote that is biased and wrong.”

If the resolution passes, the student government would urge the university and the University of Maryland College Park Foundation to implement boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against companies and institutions “complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.” 

The resolution mentions Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin as two companies that provide infrastructure used by Israel. The association would also call on the university to implement a process for student oversight on investments and partnerships to ensure it isn’t “complicit in violations of international law and human rights, including those perpetrated against the Palestinian people.”

UMD’s student government voted in support of divestment in a campuswide referendum in April, at which time the university responded that it would not divest from Israel. Other divestment resolutions fell short of advancing in 2017, 2019 and 2024. 

The University of Maryland hasn’t faced the same levels of antisemitism that have occurred on many elite campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel. 

However, the university faced controversy last year when it granted Students for Justice in Palestine a permit to hold a demonstration on the campus’ central McKeldin Mall on the first anniversary of the attacks, prompting swift backlash from campus groups including Hillel and the Jewish Student Union. 

After the university canceled the protest, SJP filed a lawsuit stating that its First Amendment rights had been violated. A federal judge wrote in an opinion that the group “has demonstrated a substantial likelihood that it will prevail [in its lawsuit] on the merits of its freedom of speech claim.” 

The university reversed its decision and allowed the demonstration to take place, but the lawsuit moved forward. In August, the University of Maryland and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown asked the state to approve their joint request to settle the First Amendment lawsuit for $100,000 paid to the plaintiffs.