JERUSALEM - August 25., 2013 - Trying to calm months of intense wrangling over the Western Wall, Israeli
officials on Sunday unveiled a new plaza where men and women can pray together.
But the move was immediately denounced as discriminatory by the main group that
has protested the rules at the holy site.
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and
diaspora affairs, said the new plaza, in an archaeological park known as Robinson’s
Arch, was an interim solution until a more comprehensive — and contentious
— plan for a mixed-prayer section could overcome bureaucratic hurdles and
opposition from archaeologists, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Muslim authorities.
Built for about $80,000, the 4,800-square-foot platform is a “compromise,” Mr.
Bennett said, whose “goal is to unify all the walks of Jewish life.”
Instead, the announcement ignited new divisions.
Leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism offered cautious
praise, while Women of the Wall, the group whose monthly prayer sessions have prompted arrests and mass demonstrations over the
past year, started a 24-hour sit-in to protest it. The prime minister’s office
distanced itself from the new plaza, releasing a statement saying the
government had yet to reach a decision on the matter.
Anat Hoffman, the leader of Women of the Wall, called
Mr. Bennett’s new plaza a “monstrosity” that “looks like a sunbathing deck” or
a “rock-star stage.” She said she would continue to push for access to the
women’s section of the main area. As the sun fell Sunday, she and about a dozen
supporters chanted the afternoon prayer under an Israeli flag near the Western
Wall, then settled in with study materials for a long night.
“They’ve taken the keys to the holiest site and just
given them to one extremist group that uses violence,” said Ms. Hoffman,
referring to the ultra-Orthodox, who have in recent months shouted and spat at
the women’s group. “We have to be vigilant and fight for every centimeter. We
are equal.”
The struggle over prayer at the wall is one of many
battles about religious practice and identity in Israel, and it has attracted
much attention from Jewish leaders abroad.
A remnant of the retaining wall of the ancient temple,
the Western Wall is one of Judaism’s most sacred sites, and since Israel took
control of it from Jordan in the 1967 war, it has been a pilgrimage site for
foreign tourists and a place for the daily prayers of thousands of Orthodox
Israelis. It is governed by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, with prayer areas segregated
by sex, and women are required to dress modestly and refrain from singing
aloud. Since the late 1990s, mixed prayer has been allowed at Robinson’s Arch,
by appointment, during limited hours and for a fee.
After 25 years in which legislation and legal rulings
barred women from wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries at the site, the
activist group won a court victory this spring allowing members to pray
as they wish. Over the past several months, thousands of ultra-Orthodox young people have crammed
the site to prevent the women from using it, creating a new set of
problems.
As outrage among American and other international Jews
mounted, Israel’s prime minister asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the
quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, to find a solution. Mr. Sharansky proposed
a new mixed-prayer area adjacent to the women’s section and accessible from
the main entrance, unlike the current Robinson’s Arch.
He also spoke about changes to the main plaza behind
the current prayer area, and a governing body for the mixed area that would
include non-Orthodox leaders.
The plaza Mr. Bennett unveiled Sunday sits atop
scaffolding but remains several dozen feet below the main Western Wall area. To
get there, visitors must wind their way through an archaeological park and up
and down many stairs. Equipped with Torah scrolls and tables, prayer shawls and
prayer books, it is open around the clock, for free, just like the main site.
No one was there Sunday evening as the women’s group commenced its protest a
few hundred yards away.
“If it is, as is suggested, a temporary step on the
longer journey toward the transformative plan, then it’s a very nice step,”
said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “But
it’s a very, very small step — very modest.”
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, described the move as “important steps forward,” adding, “Unfortunately, the interim solution is not going to satisfy everybody.”