Last week's protest of WoW (Forward) |
It's not about male domination of the Wall. It's about defending and respecting tradition. Ask the over one thousand Orthodox young women protesting the Women of the Wall. From Naomi Zeveloff at the Forward:
For years, women in Israel have been fighting for the right
to pray out loud at Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall, just like men.
But now, a group of girls has risen up to defend the status quo.
On Tuesday, February 28, at least 1,000 female high school
students were bused to there to protest a prayer service of Women of the Wall,
the biggest group trying to make egalitarian prayer a reality at the Wall.
It was a striking scene: On one side of a police barricade
specially erected for the event stood throngs of Orthodox teenage girls in long
skirts and sweaters with holy books in hand. On the other side, around 120
Women of the Wall activists in prayer shawls and phylacteries, the black
leather boxes and straps many Jews wear at morning prayer, celebrated the bat
mitzvah of a 12-year-old Israeli girl.
While most of the Orthodox teenagers prayed peacefully, a
few yelled “animals” at the Women of the Wall group, according to news reports.
(Organizers said that they instructed the girls to be respectful.)
The teen girl pray-in was organized by The Liba Center, a
coalition of nationalist groups, and Women for the Wall. The latter wants to
maintain the status quo at the Western Wall, where women and men pray
separately with restrictions on female prayer.
The girls missed school for a full day of events in the Old
City. After praying at the Western Wall, they went to the Jewish section of
Jerusalem’s Old City to dance and listen to a sermon by Shmuel Eliyahu, the
chief rabbi of Tsfat.
Among the girls was a 12-year-old student from Petach Tikva
who woke at 4 a.m. to travel to Jerusalem with two friends. Her school had
allowed the students to skip classes to attend, so long as they received
parental permission. The girl was eager to attend the event, which was
organized by two Liba-affiliated high school students, she said. Her mother
easily obliged. “Some things we learn in school and some things we learn not in
school,” she said.
(The girl and her mother spoke on the condition of anonymity
for privacy reasons.)
The teenager was motivated to go to fill up the women’s
section with people who prayed according to the site’s Orthodox rules. The idea
was to prove to the outside world that they were a bigger group than Women of
the Wall.
“It wasn’t to fight against the Reform,” she said,
referencing one of the non-Orthodox groups fighting for egalitarianism at the
Western Wall, “but to fill up the place.”
Even so, anti-Reform sentiment was on display as the girl
came home with a T-shirt from the Liba youth cohort with the words, “The
eternal wall for the eternal people and not the Reform cult.”
When the 13-year-old reported back to her family about her
day, she noted that some of the loudest fighters were not Women of the Wall,
but Orthodox adult women who whistled shrilly to drown out the Women of the
Wall prayers. “How can we daven [pray] with all this noise?” she said.
Women of the Wall say that the Orthodox are the ones turning
the Western Wall into a battle ground, and that some groups are using the young
women as ammunition to thwart the cause of religious equality at the Western
Wall.
“I’m sad that they are setting up the women against us,”
said Lesley Sachs, executive director of Women of the Wall. “I don’t think that
this is a women’s battle against women. I think this is a battle of
ultra-Orthodox men trying to tell women, whomever, how to dress, what to say,
what to do and
where to stand.”
Women for the Wall founder Leah Aharoni rejected the notion
that the young women are being unfairly used in the fight over the Western
Wall. She said that her group was simply providing a “platform” for the teenage
fervor about the Jewish holy site.
She said that she met with 40 young female leaders recently
and they named the Western Wall as a major area of concern. “They were very
disturbed,” she said. “That is their spiritual home.”
Yigal Canaan, an activist with The Liba Center, conceded
that young women have a strategic role to play in countering Women of the Wall.
His group is countering a now-stalled government plan, negotiated with Women of
the Wall and other liberal Jewish groups, to create an egalitarian section just
south of the traditional Western Wall. In a video released last week, The Liba
Center accused the feminist group of seeking to “divide” the heart of the
Jewish people.
“I think that in every struggle, young people are more enthusiastic
and more ideological,” he said. The presence of women also helps counter claims
that the Western Wall religious authorities are discriminating against women.
Women want the “traditional way,” he said.
Aharoni said that the prayer service was a lesson for the
teen girls: “This is a message for our
daughters to learn. If it is something
that concerns you, it is productive for you to voice that concern.”