Two years ago, pro-Palestinian demonstrators unfurled a hand-painted banner from a building on Columbia University’s campus, renaming it Hind’s Hall for Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl killed in Gaza a few months before.
Now there is a new version of Hind’s Hall near Columbia, a restaurant that is not an act of protest but an effort to honor Palestinian culture and Hind’s memory through food and community.
The owners chose the name to raise awareness about how Hind died and what she had come to represent: the cost of war for children, and the continuing pain and displacement of the Palestinian people.
Hinds Hall — the restaurant does not use the apostrophe — is also a nod to the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of Columbia. It is a branch of a Palestinian restaurant chain, Ayat, with nine other locations in New York and nationally. Ayat donated food to help support the demonstrators’ two-week encampment in April 2024.
“I’ll put Hinds Hall over there just to keep her name alive, and whoever does not know Hind Rajab, they will know,” said Abdul Elenani, the Egyptian American restaurateur who owns the restaurant with his Palestinian American wife, Ayat Masoud.
Naming the restaurant Hinds Hall is also a charged choice in a neighborhood that still vividly recalls the night when protesters took over Hamilton Hall, in an act that Columbia administrators, Republican lawmakers and many others argued went too far.
When they occupied the building, which they renamed Hind’s Hall, masked protesters broke windows, chained doors, damaged walls and furniture, and trapped maintenance workers inside for about 30 minutes, traumatizing them, the workers later said. The neighborhood was flooded with police officers for days.
“To damage property and all that, that is something for sure that I am not with,” Mr. Elenani said. The message behind his restaurant chain, he added, is to peacefully bring attention to the occupation of Palestine, through food and culture.
The name, he added, is not about saying, “Oh, I agree with the damages you guys did,” but about supporting the effort to remember an innocent girl who was shot at hundreds of times.
“It’s about leading by example at the end of the day,” Mr. Elenani said. “It’s not about animosity. It’s not about hate.”
The restaurant, the first in the neighborhood to serve Palestinian food, has been busy since it opened on March 28, with lines forming in the evening.
Mr. Elenani said he wasn’t sure how he would be received in the area. When the location was under construction, at West 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, someone opened the door and cursed out the workers, he said.
They didn’t react. They were used to it. In the past, some of his other restaurants have been vandalized or bombarded with fake one-star reviews.
But since the opening of Hinds Hall, “it’s been very loving and a warm feeling so far,” he said. Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian activist detained for months by the Trump administration, and Leqaa Kordia, another protester detained after her arrest at a Columbia demonstration, have both stopped by to eat. So have hundreds of local residents without any tie to the protests who just want to try the food.
Online, the reaction has been positive, with a few exceptions. Some say that the restaurant should guarantee that some of its proceeds go to Hind’s family, or at least to Gaza, to avoid capitalizing on the tragedy.
Mr. Elenani said that he had spoken with Hind’s mother to get her blessing on opening the restaurant, and that an upcoming free community dinner would serve as a fund-raiser for the family. His businesses donate to Palestinian humanitarian relief, mostly through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, though he doesn’t set a specific percentage. “We just give whatever we can,” Mr. Elenani said.
Mercedes Olmsted, a 30-year-old who is a data analyst for the city, was riding her bike to a work event last week when she did a double take upon seeing the restaurant and decided to stop.
She donated a 10-person tent to the Columbia encampments two years ago, she recalled over a meal of labneh and wood-fired pita. Now she could support a business that was willing to take a public stance on an issue she cared about.
“It’s important that we are spending our money and investing in places that are also going to reflect our political values,” she said. “Not even political values, but like our moral compass.”
Ms. Olmsted, like many patrons, already knew the story of Hind, who, along with her four cousins and aunt and uncle, had been riding in a car when Israeli forces fired hundreds of bullets at them on Jan. 29, 2024, as the family attempted to evacuate to safety, several independent investigations later determined.
Hind and one cousin survived the initial barrage, and were able to call for help. But in the end, the cousin, Hind and the Palestinian paramedics who tried to rescue her all died. An Oscar-nominated film, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” has been made about the shooting, some of which was captured on live phone recordings. The Israeli military has denied wrongdoing.
Ms. Masoud, a lawyer whose family recipes form the backbone of the menu, said that the restaurant’s name represented an evolution in Ayat’s public stance.
“In the beginning, it was about family culture, wanting to really interest people in the beauty of Palestine, not the controversy of Palestine,” she said. “But with everything going on, I think it’s necessary for people to know that we stand for humanity. It’s really more than just Palestine.”
Hinds Hall seeks to make the argument that supporting a Palestinian state is compatible with peace, equality and harmony. Its menu cover says both “Share the Love” and “Down With the Occupation,” in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
The upcoming free dinner for the neighborhood is a common feature for Mr. Elenani’s restaurants when they open. He is known in liberal Jewish circles in New York for his community outreach, including hosting a public Shabbat dinner at the Ayat branch in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn amid tensions that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel. More than 1,300 people attended the dinner.
As a steady lunch crowd cycled through Hinds Hall on a recent afternoon, the mood was upbeat.
Chelsea Tran, 23, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who lives nearby, said she was at first surprised by the restaurant’s name. Usually, businesses go out of their way to avoid controversy.
“I was like, wow, that’s very strong,” she said. “I need to know what type of food it’s going to be here.” Then she went online and realized it was a sibling to the Ayat branch near her friend’s apartment in the East Village, and invited the friend and another for lunch.
“It’s going to touch a lot of Columbia students when they walk past,” she said, “and make them feel like their voices were heard.”
Yasmin Ramadan, 31, who was eating kofta and kebabs at an outdoor table with a friend from her Columbia doctoral program, said that several people on the street had stopped to ask them about the food, the restaurant and the kaffiyehs, or traditional Palestinian scarves, they were wearing.
“It just felt like more than just a place where we eat food,” she said.
In a classic New York coincidence, Meir Levy, 34, a modern Orthodox Jew, is about to open a kosher restaurant, called Picnic by The Black Parrot, next door to Hinds Hall. He and Mr. Elenani have struck up a friendship in recent weeks as both worked to get their places ready. Last Wednesday, he dropped by to borrow a tape measure.
The two slapped hands and exchanged greetings.
Both their restaurants have the same aim: “Make the neighborhood better,” Mr. Levy said. “Then we all live better. We all eat better.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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