Because it might make you regurgitate.

Israeli Women’s Prayers Hit Reactionary Wall

By Michele Chabin

WeNews correspondent

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

A woman wearing tefillin touches the Western Wall. Women in Israel are prohibited from wearing tefillin and prayer shawls at the Western Wall.

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 Ashdod no longer employs female workers and the same is true for a handful of Jerusalem health maintenance organizations and a post office.

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.”

Religious Extremists Emboldened

Seth Farber is a modern-Orthodox rabbi and the director of ITIM, a Jerusalem organization that helps people navigate the bureaucracy of the Orthodox Rabbinate and other government institutions. He believes that the clout ultra-Orthodox political parties first obtained in the late 1980s by joining successive governments has gradually emboldened religious extremists.

“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.”

Michele Chabin is the Israel correspondent for the New York Jewish Week, Religion News Service and the National Catholic Register. She has been reporting from Israel for more than 20 years.

It should be no shock to any of you, dear readers, that I am completely disgusted.  I think Einat Ramon’s comments, though not here in full are moving us backwards instead of ceasing an opportunity to propel women’s rights forward.  Naomi Ragen seems to be fighting for an important cause here (I do not agree with other things that she says/does) and she is doing so with the Israel Religious Action Center, a group that each of us need to help!

Rosh Chodesh is coming (on Sunday).  This means that the Women of the Wall will again gather with the threat of violence from the Haredi establishment looming.

After the past week Israel still needs our support.  Whether or not we like or agree with the actions of the military is irrelevant.  We must give our support to the organizations and the people who are doing the work on behalf of the liberal Jewish world so that we can have equal rights in Israel.

Rabbi Tarfon once said, “It is not up to you to finish the work, yet you are not free to avoid it,” (Avot 2.16).

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I also have a new background and theme.  Any thoughts or feedback?