City removes day from diversity and inclusion calendar following concern from Jewish organization

Concord City Hall File
Published: 01-06-2025 3:22 PM
Modified: 01-06-2025 10:43 PM |
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments from Concord Mayor Byron Champlin.
Late last month, a leader in New Hampshire’s Jewish community reached out to Concord staff to express concern about a description on a little-known “diversity & inclusion” calendar the city maintains on its website.
Allyson Guertin, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of New Hampshire, reached out to the city after a “community member” informed her of Concord’s calendar listing for Nakba Day, which Palestinians observe as a day of mourning to commemorate their ancestors’ displacement during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
To many Israelis and Jews, however, the day is an explicit rejection of Israel’s founding and existence. The country celebrates its independence day on the day before Nakba Day, which is May 15.
Guertin said in an interview Monday that she reached out to the city not to get the day removed, but rather to ask that the description of the day be revised.
“We were hoping to talk with them about rewriting it so that it came off to be unbiased and accurate,” Guertin said.
After initially consulting with Guertin on a new description, the city ultimately opted to remove the day entirely instead, characterizing its original inclusion in a statement as “a grave oversight.”
“The City of Concord does not support antisemitism or racism and is currently working on building systemic equity infrastructure within the organization,” it wrote in the unsigned statement posted to Facebook on Friday.
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The calendar has been on the city website since late 2022 and was posted by staff in the city’s public information office, Mayor Byron Champlin said in an interview. The list was derived from a website called diversityresources.com, which appears to be a DEI content creation company based in Colorado.
Champlin said the idea for the list came from Lebanon. A list from 2023 on that city’s website also includes Nakba Day, though Lebanon appears to have discontinued the practice of posting an annual calendar since.
Concord’s list includes well-known celebrations such as Black History Month, and religious holidays, such as Christmas, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Diwali and YomKippur. It also includes occasions for observance like Earth Day, Arbor Day and International Transgender Day of Visibility.
Each entry is followed by a short description. The description for Nakba Day read: “This observance marks the Nakba, or Catastrophe, during which Zionist forces in 1948 expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people from their homelands. During the expulsion, hundreds of villages were attacked and destroyed and some 15,000 Palestinians were killed.”
Guertin said the framing of the description was flawed for several reasons.
“I think the struggle is that, unfortunately, this was a war where there was a winning side and a losing side,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s accurate that hundreds of thousands of people were expelled.”
Guertin said that “there’s controversy around whether they were told to leave or chose to leave and I think it just paints an ugly picture about how Israel handled the end of the war.”
For some, the backlash from the inclusion of Nakba Day, which has resulted in scores of form emails to city leaders, has raised questions about the creation and maintenance of a calendar they were previously unaware existed at all.
“If the calendar was on the website and most of us didn't know about it – even the folks who are involved in the city pretty intensely – then what did it do? How did it function in a positive way?” asked Councilor Judith Kurtz, who is the lone Jewish member of the city council. “And if making decisions about what’s on the calendar versus what’s not on a calendar takes up time and resources away from doing real, significant work on addressing issues in our city that affect people, I would rather have us spend time working on other things.”
Champlin saw the cost-benefit analysis of posting and maintaining the list slightly differently.
“I think the issue here is not so much the use of city resources in posting it, but the use of city resources in responding to the fallout,” he said.
Guertin, for her part, said she was satisfied with how the city handled her concerns and said the situation had been “blown completely out of proportion.”
“Somehow, it made its way to the media, and because of that, it became something bigger than it was,” Guertin said. “The city of Concord has been open and completely receptive to the feedback and immediately handled the situation.”
Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.