Jewish Women battle discrimination in Israel

Original Source-http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/06/23/jewish_women_battle_discrimination_in_israel_siddiqui.html

Researcher- Avantika Lal

Shira Ben-Sasson Furstenberg is an Israeli women’s rights activist. She organizes “freedom rides” to help end gender segregation on public transit buses travelling through ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods.

Israeli courts have held that women may voluntarily sit at the back of the bus and enter and exit through a back door, but they don’t have to. However, few women have moved up front, and some of them have been harassed by men.

“I am Orthodox and observant but I don’t want to sit separately in a bus,” says Furstenberg, a former officer of the Israeli Defense Forces.

“So, some of us have been conducting freedom rides — inviting tourists and others to sit in the men’s section. I went and sat in the second row. As the men came, they wouldn’t sit next to me or in the seats around me. I was not spoken to by the men. Nobody touched me or hurt me but it was not fun.”

Jewish zealots have cursed and spat at school girls deemed immodestly dressed. Vandals have blacked out faces of women from ads on buses and billboards.

Under pressure to do something, the Benjamin Netanyahu government plans to outlaw gender discrimination on buses, health clinics, cemeteries and radio waves, and make humiliation of women in public spaces a criminal offence.

Furstenberg is involved in another “war zone” — to end gender bias at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Since 1988, activists of the Women of the Wall have been turning up on Rosh Hodesh, the first day of the Hebrew month, to worship. Instead of praying quietly in a separate section, they do what only men have done by tradition — chant verses from the Torah and wear the talit, fringed prayer shawl.

Some were arrested for disturbing public order. Last month, thousands of Orthodox women turned up early in the morning to block the Women of the Wall, who were taunted and abused by men in black hats throwing water and plastic chairs.

Furstenberg joined the activists on two occasions. “I got yelled at. I got called names. I was filmed. It’s a real war zone.”

Under a recent court ruling, the arrests have stopped. And the government has promised to allow different ways of praying at the holy site. It has also pledged full participation of women in state ceremonies.

Progress is becoming possible because the ultra-Orthodox, a minority that for years exercised disproportionate power in coalition governments, are no longer part of Netanyahu’s current coalition.

He is under pressure also to reduce military service exemptions and welfare subsidies to the ultra-Orthodox, and ease their control of religious institutions and practices, including marriage, divorce, conversions and burials.

“The majority of Israelis have to bow down to the Orthodox monopoly, even though there’s more than one way of being Jewish,” says Furstenberg. For example, “there’s only one female rabbi on state payroll. There’s only one way to divorce. Under get laws, only the husband can give divorce. And the rabbinical courts go along with the husbands’ demands — he would not pay support or he would dictate on how the kids are to be educated. There’s a lot of blackmail.”

Furstenberg was invited to Canada by the New Israel Fund , and spoke at the Beth Tzedec Congregation Monday and at a Jewish centre in Vancouver later in the week. With her was Yossi Beilin, a former Labor minister, former member of the Israeli Knesset and a long-time advocate of peace with Palestinians. He spoke in Toronto and Montreal.

I interviewed both together.

He said social divisions in Israel — especially over the secular-religious fault line — usually come to the fore when the security issue is less paramount.

To him, the issue of gender equity at the Wall “is not the most important. The need for the separation of church and state is the main issue.”

“The matrimonial law is especially unacceptable. Many Israelis bypass it by opting for civil marriage.

“On the bus issue, the ultra-Orthodox argue that women are sitting separately voluntarily. But not all are doing it voluntarily. They are doing it because they are afraid of family and neighbours. They are frightened of their rabbis.”

But he’s happy that discrimination is being challenged and that change is coming, albeit slowly.