Eat Ortega |
Jerusalem (EFE) tall, wearing religious clothing and reading Torah scrolls.
Clad in flower-embroidered ritual cloaks and wearing rainbow-hued yarmulkes, dozens of members of the Women of the Wall (WOW) organization arrive once a month at Judaism’s holiest place of worship, defying orthodox mandates. .
Their chants and prayers, “that no woman or girl be silenced again in your town, Israel,” resound melodiously but forcefully between the limestone walls of the square, to which they come carrying the phylactery used by Jewish men when praying. .
This could cost them six months in jail or a NIS 10,000 (nearly $3,000) fine if a bill from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which seeks to criminalize any religious act on the Wall that does not abide by the Orthodox canon, is passed.
“What was a religious issue has become political. The Orthodox current has a monopoly in Israel to determine what can and cannot be done in the holy spaces. There is no religious pluralism, other currents of Judaism are not taken into account », such as the reformist or the egalitarian Orthodox, laments Sandra Kochmann, the first rabbi of a conservative current in her native Paraguay.
“You arrive in Israel with the dream of praying in the most sacred place and they tell you ‘you have no rights here, you are useless,'” this member of the WOW Council, who immigrated to the Jewish State in 2005, told Efe.
religion versus democracy
Shas’s initiative – a fundamental ally of the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the most right-wing in the history of Israel – so scandalized that the prime minister himself rejected it, despite the fact that it was part of his coalition agreements with that party.
These political contradictions are endemic to Israel, explains Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz of the Israel Institute for Democracy.
A self-proclaimed Jewish and democratic state at the same time, Israel needs “on the one hand, to be modern and give equality to women; and on the other, to preserve the traditional status », she explains.
Regardless of where the scales lean, Anat Hoffman, who has led the 400 Women of the Wall for more than three decades, is not afraid: “I am willing to go to jail for praying the way I do,” she launches.
In 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City and the Western Wall, the Chief Rabbinate appointed ultra-Orthodox leaders to maintain “traditional Jewish practices” at this holy site.
This includes women praying separately from men, in silence, individually, and without wearing ritual accessories or reading Torah scrolls, Judaism’s holy scriptures.
Instead, the men pray in a group, microphone in hand and in full religious attire.
«Heroines»
Although these segregationist norms are not laws, the Women of the Wall face jeers, shoves and insults every time they pray in the holy square, from Orthodox men – and women – who also come to pray.
“Build your own wall in Tel Aviv!” they yelled at them, while being escorted by police officers.
“I’ve been pinched, spit on, kicked, everything. The worst was a few years ago when 40 prayer books were taken from us and shredded in front of us,” says Tammy Gottlieb, WOW’s vice president, whose thick, powerful voice frequently leads the choirs.
Made up of writers, scientists, former soldiers or daughters of Holocaust survivors of all ages and Jewish currents, including secular ones, this feminist group began to pray equally at the Wall in 1988, avoiding police repression.
25 years and 50 arrests later, the Justice decided in 2013 that these women do not violate the law and that the traditional practice of the Wall must be interpreted in a pluralistic way.
“The Wall is the ultra-orthodox religious epicenter of Israel, fighting from that center of gravity makes us heroines,” Hoffman estimates.
Her movement made it legal for women to wear the tallit (ritual cloak), tefillin (phylactery) and pray aloud. But they are still prohibited from reading Torah scrolls.
“There is no choice”
The imposing Wailing Wall is divided into two sections, one -larger- for men and another for women.
In 2016, pressure from the Women of the Wall led the Israeli Parliament to approve the provision of a third section, pluralistic and egalitarian, so that non-Orthodox women and men pray in their own way.
But objection from the ultra-Orthodox halted the project, and Netanyahu has no intention of resuming it.
“The status quo of the Wailing Wall will remain as it is,” he warned yesterday.
In protest, WOW will continue to pray in the Orthodox women’s section.
“No choice. We do not want to live in a state where it is legitimate to tell a woman to shut up because she is a woman,” Gottlieb stresses.