Women of the Wall (WoW)

Image via Wikipedia/The Kotel, men's side

I am following, not without amusement, many of the stages of the Reform movement. I refrain for making judgements of valor. Sometimes it is about two worlds who are face to face and don't know what to say to each other. And they start yelling incoherently. That's all. For today, we prepared: Women of the Wall (WOW).

According to its website, the organisation's mission is to win the social and legal right for women to wear tallit, pray and read out loud from the Torah collectively at the Kotel. In their own words, “as Women of the Wall, our central mission is to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall. We work to further our mission through social advocacy, education and empowerment”.

Since December 1988 – the movement was created during the International Jewish Feminist Conference in Jerusalem - the members are meeting monthly, the first day of every month of the Jewish calendar, being joined by some men or by groups belonging to the Reform, all over the world. They come together to form a Minyan at the Kotel, and they continue the Shacharit service and Hallel in the front of the Wall and end up by reading the Torah at Robinson’s Arch, a prayer place for groups that do not meet the approval of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. WoW, with members all over the world, is considered the only place in Israel in which Orthodox, Conservative and Israel’s Reform Movement members can pray together.

Most part of the time, the Orthodox men are gathering to curse them and more or less violent arguments are frequently taking place. Chief Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, forbid women from wearing tallit, carrying or reading Torah, and singing their prayers as a Minyan. There are complains (based on the the Talmudic principle of “Kol b’isha erva/The voice of a woman is nakedness”, which is greatly discussed up to various contexts) that the women singing could provoke feelings of lust among the men praying on the other side of the partition. The Sephardic spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said that women who pray in a tallit at the Kotel are “stupid”, and “deviant” and “should be slapped”.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that women are allowed to read from the Torah and wear a tallit as an outer garment at the Kotel. But four days after that ruling, ultra-Orthodox Knesset members submitted successfully a bill to make these acts illegal — and punishable by up to seven years in prison. As a result, the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled it illegal for women to read Torah or wear an outer tallit at the Kotel plaza. In 2003, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that WoW could not hold vocal prayers at the wall as this presented a threat to law and order.

One year ago, the Medicine student Nofrat Frankel was arrested infringing these provisions. This July, on Shavuot, police arrested the Executive Director of the Israeli Religious Action Center which is part of the Reform Movement and current chair of WoW, Anat Hoffman, for holding a Torah scroll. She was fined 1,300$ and placed under a retraining order that bared her from the Kotel for 30 days. If convicted, Hoffman, former Jerusalem municipal council member, faces a sentence of up to three years in prison. She insists the Jewish holy books do not support the kind of discrimination she says women are subjected to. According to the Israeli media, she was quoted saying that "there is nothing in Judaism about this. This is fundamentalism; it is a desecration of this place".