A university in Germany has abruptly cancelled an event with an Israeli survivor of a Hamas massacre in 2023, saying the safety of the participants could not be guaranteed.
The Free University (FU) Berlin – Berlin’s biggest with more than 35,000 students – was meant to host a talk with Hadar Sharvit late last month.
Sharvit is an Israeli maths teacher who narrowly survived the attack by Palestinian Islamist terror group Hamas on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023 while more than 370 other predominantly young Israelis were killed.
Shortly before the event the university abruptly cancelled it due to warnings from German and Israeli security agencies, according to newspaper FAZ on November 10.
“The Free University Berlin does not seem to be a place in which you can freely talk about the massacre in which 1,200 Jews were murdered”, wrote FAZ commentator Thomas Thiel.
He pointed out that the university had hosted a number of large-scale anti-Semitic events in the past. These included a protest on the campus in May 2024 in which Jews were marked with Hamas triangles as well as an event in 2025 in which people demanded the “globalisation of the Intifada”.
Intifada primarily refers to two major Palestinian uprisings against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1987–1993 and 2000–2005.
German Jewish pianist Igor Levit accused FU Berlin of cowardice in a post on X on November 10, writing: “Cowardice in its purest form. It disgusts me. It should disgust all of you.”
The university told local newspaper Berliner Zeitung yesterday that the decision to cancel the talk had been made by the Israelis.
“Due to safety concerns, the Nova Exhibition team decided to relocate the discussion with contemporary witnesses involving a group of students and FU employees,” a university spokesperson said.
The talk was finally held on November 10 at the Nova Exhibition about the 2023 massacre, held under high security at Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport.
Sharvit told the audience of how she had heard the first shots at eight in the morning, how she hid in a bush and said goodbye to her father on the phone.
Sharvit said she then hid for five hours on a plantation while she heard the sounds of her fellow festivalgoers being maimed, raped and killed around her. “Our hearts are still broken,” she said.
