Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews have gathered on the Western Wall in Jerusalem to protest towards a Jewish girls’s group that holds month-to-month prayers there in a long-running marketing campaign for gender equality on the web site
JERUSALEM — Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered on the Western Wall in Jerusalem to protest towards a Jewish girls’s group that holds month-to-month prayers there in a long-running marketing campaign for gender equality on the web site.
For many years the “Ladies of the Wall” group has campaigned for equality of worship on the wall, certainly one of Judaism’s holiest websites. Israel’s spiritual establishments are dominated by the ultra-Orthodox, who’re against any modifications on the web site, the place women and men pray in separate areas.
The dispute has sharpened for the reason that swearing-in of a brand new authorities in June pushed Israel’s ultra-Orthodox events into the opposition. A newly elected lawmaker who can also be a Reform rabbi has used his parliamentary immunity to deliver Torah scrolls into the ladies’s part in defiance of guidelines enforced by the ultra-Orthodox directors of the positioning.
Police arrange steel barricades and deployed in massive numbers to carry again the principally male protesters, who blew whistles and sometimes surged ahead solely to be pushed again. The ladies carried empty mantles used to cloak Torah scrolls to protest the prohibition on bringing the scrolls themselves into the ladies’s part.
Anat Hoffman, the founding father of the group, mentioned they’re “preventing for equality and non secular pluralism and justice.”
“We can not learn from the Torah within the girls’s part in 2021,” she mentioned. “Why not? Why the hell not?”
Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right member of parliament who usually makes provocative appearances at Jerusalem protests, approached the barricades along with his entourage and argued with one of many girls shouting, “don’t hurt the Western Wall.” He left minutes later, as supporters of the ladies replied, “Ben Gvir go residence!”
The protests had been referred to as for by ultra-Orthodox leaders, together with Aryeh Deri, head of the Shas get together. In a tweet on Friday that was shared by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Deri referred to as on his supporters to return out “in order that heaven forbid this holy place is just not desecrated.”
Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and newly elected parliament member from the center-left Labor get together, had deliberate to deliver a Torah scroll into the positioning for the ladies to make use of however referred to as off his go to on the request of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who sought to stop battle on the web site.
Netanyahu had shelved plans for an egalitarian prayer house on the wall in 2017 below strain from the ultra-Orthodox events who’re politically allied with him.
The transfer infuriated adherents of extra liberal strains of Judaism to which most Jews in North America adhere. The dispute has been a significant level of friction between the 2 largest Jewish communities on the planet, in Israel and the US.
In Israel, ultra-Orthodox rabbis tightly management Jewish practices together with weddings, divorces, and burials, viewing it as their accountability to protect traditions which have endured centuries of persecution and assimilation. They regularly resist requires reforms from liberals, usually deeming them second-class Jews who ordain girls and members of the LGBTQ neighborhood and are overly accepting in the direction of converts and interfaith marriages.
