TORONTO

Voices from Toronto’s Jewish community are accusing a group of Muslim and pro-Palestinian university students of scuttling a vote by their union to commemorate Holocaust Education Week.

The controversy unfolded during Tuesday’s general meeting of the Ryerson Student Union (RSU), which was set to vote on a Jewish student group’s motion to hold Holocaust Education Week events.

According to a member of Hillel Ryerson, students from the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP Ryerson) and the Muslim Students Association (RMSA) first called for an amendment to the motion to include all forms of genocide.

But then they walked out, causing the meeting to lose quorum and the vote to die, Hillel Ryerson’s Aedan O’Connor says. “Instead of going through with trying to amend it, they ... decided to walk out,” she said Wednesday.

It wasn’t long before Amanda Hohmann, of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, heard from students about the meeting.

She called the walk-out a “premeditated move” on the part of some members of SJP Ryerson and the RMSA.

“When they realized the original motion would likely pass as it was presented, (they) ... got up and walked out as a way of removing quorum so that the motion couldn’t pass,” Hohmann said, calling it an act of anti-Semitism.

“There is no other way to characterize this, but (as) anti-Jewish sentiment,” she said, urging the government to intervene. “It’s a systemic issue ... (on) many university campuses across Canada ... Universities are funded by taxpayer dollars and there needs to be some accountability at the government level.”

The RMSA declined comment, while SJP Ryerson and the RSU didn’t return messages.

TDavidson@postmedia.com