Members of the Jewish community in Hamburg demonstrated outside the German city’s University of the Fine Arts in protest against the recent appointment of two guest faculty members who were involved in curating this year’s Documenta art show, which was plagued by a succession of antisemitism scandals.

“I cannot understand how one can come up with the idea of ​​bringing two people from this group to Hamburg as a reward and offering them a guest professorship,” Shlomo Bistritzky, Hamburg’s main rabbi, told reporters during the protest.

Around 20 members of the community attended the demonstration, carrying a banner that declared, “We are not pigs. For art without Jew hatred” — a reference to a mural that was later removed from the show which featured a soldier wearing a helmet shaped in the head of a pig and emblazoned with the word “Mossad,” Israel’s security and intelligence agency.

The two artists at the center of the protest — Reza Afisina, a cinematographer, and Iswanto Hartono, an architect — were introduced last week as guest members of the faculty at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HfbK). Both artists, whose work is heavily political, have long been involved with ruangrupa, a group of Indonesian artists selected to curate the fifteenth edition of the Documenta festival, one of the world’s main showcases for contemporary art, in the city of Kassel.

Both positions are being financed by the DAAD, Germany’s state-funded institution for academic exchanges.

This year’s Documenta festival, which closed last month, was overshadowed by consistent reports of antisemitism in the artworks in display. As well as the offending mural, the festival also included a triptych featuring a man wearing a kipah proffering large bags of money and a brochure containing antisemitic drawings of Israeli soldiers. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz canceled a visit to the festival in protest at the presence of antisemitic works, while the festival’s director, Sabine Schormann, tendered her resignation in July amid condemnation from German politicians and Jewish leaders over the festival’s apparent indifference to the presence of antisemitic imagery.

HfBK’s decision to appoint Afisina and Hartono drew condemnation from local politicians and Jewish leaders. “Anyone who has proven that, after several months at the Documenta, they do not want to abandon their antisemitic ideas has no place at a public university in Germany,” Michael Fürst, the Hamburg Jewish community’s chairperson, said in response to the initial announcement.

In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt news outlet earlier this month, Afisina and Hartono strongly denied the allegation that they had promoted hatred of Jews at the show. “We are not antisemites. We are not enemies of the State of Israel,” they asserted.