WUNRN
June 9, 2010
A woman wearing tefillin touches the Western Wall.
Women in
"You're an abomination," the man shouted while
kicking her.
The episode occurred on May
11. The man is a member
In a letter to the
In another incident, Israeli police detained Nofat
Frankel in November 2009 because she wrapped herself in a prayer shawl--called
a tallit--while praying at the Western Wall, the holiest place in Judaism.
Police said the act violated a 2003 High Court decision
prohibiting female worshipers at the Wall from donning a tallit or tefillin--a
leather box worn during some worship ceremonies--and from reading out loud from
the Torah.
Such acts, the court said, presented a "threat to
public security" because they incited haredim to violence.
At the time of her detention, Frankel was worshiping with
the Women of the Wall, a multi-denominational Jewish women's prayer group that
convenes at the Western Wall at the start of every Jewish month.
Share |
During the group's 20-year
existence, haredim have harassed them numerous times, both verbally and
physically. Haredi men often throw chairs over the divider that separates the sexes
and women have been injured.
Seven weeks after Frankel's detention, the police called
in Anat Hoffman, a co-founder of the Women of the Wall, to "discuss"
Frankel's behavior.
"I was interrogated," Hoffman, who is also the
director of
Hoffman, like many members of her group, wears a
brightly-colored prayer shawl.
"I was finger printed and warned that this is a
felony," she said.
Although the case appears to be in legal limbo, thanks,
Hoffman believes, to an outcry from non-Orthodox U.S. Jews, Hoffman is worried.
"Lawlessness in the name of religion may have
started with the Wall, but it's moved into other arenas," she said.
Women's rights activists say extremists in the
haredi community are forcing their fervent brand of religiosity on the Israeli
public and that one of their tactics is to marginalize women.
"In any patriarchy, when you want to embrace power
you must make someone feel inferior," said Naomi Ragen, a best-selling
American-Israeli novelist whose books ("The Saturday Wife," "The
Covenant") feature strong Jewish women fighting for equality in the
Orthodox world.
Several haredi leaders have succeeded in banning female
performers from many municipal and national events. Due to their influence, a
police station in the coastal town of
Ragen said haredi extremists have succeeded in
segregating many public buses by gender.
Ragen, who co-petitioned the High Court to ban segregated
bus lines after she was harassed for refusing to sit at the back of a bus, said
she recently encountered a haredi man with a small child on a very crowded bus.
"The child sat next to him. When an elderly woman
boarded he refused to place the child on his lap. He didn't want a woman to sit
next to him," she said.
It's not that he didn't care about the woman, the author
emphasized. "It's that he wanted to be a holy person. In the process, he
and others are overriding the Torah's precepts of being decent to people."
Seth Farber is a modern-Orthodox rabbi and the director
of ITIM, a
"They feel greater confidence to impose their social
norms on the general population. The women's issue is just one facet,"
Farber said.
Ragen, also modern-Orthodox, said she felt equally
"infuriated" when, earlier this year, she heard that Frankel and
Hoffman had been detained.
"On the one hand the Kotel [Wall] is a synagogue and
does have its own rules. But because it's the center and heart of the Jewish
religion, everyone should have access to it," she said. "Whatever the
women are doing can't be worse than someone throwing chairs. When this happens,
who is really disrespecting the Kotel?"
It is time, Ragen said, "for people to take back
this religion."
However, not everyone believes that a woman's right to
wear prayer shawls at the Wall is part of the battle against religious
fanaticism,
Einat Ramon, the first Israeli-born female rabbi, said
that her Masorti (Conservative) stream of Judaism agreed to honor the High
Court's 2003 ruling which, in addition to banning prayer shawls, ordered the
government to develop Robinson's Arch, a secluded section of the Western Wall
for use by non-Orthodox Jews.
"Sending our daughters to be wrapped in tallit at
the section of the Wall that is run according to Orthodox interpretations of Jewish
law is a violation…of our agreement with the State of Israel," Ramon said.
"It violates the moral-legal principle of minhag makom: respect for the
customs of a certain place and for the rabbi and community that adheres to
him."
Hoffman counters that on the men's side of the Wall
custom undergoes constant innovation. "Someone brings in a drummer to
perform at a bar-mitzvah and men find meaningful new ways to celebrate. It's
only the women who must stick to 'minhag makom,'" she said.
"The Women of the Wall have been praying there for
20 years," Hoffman added. "If that's not a custom by now, I don't
know what is."
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.