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Bedlam at Western Wall: Israeli Reform rabbi blamed for ‘provocation’

“We regret that this group saw fit to turn the Western Wall into a site of provocation without taking into account the consequences, the harm to the public’s feelings and the sanctity of the place,” the Western Wall Foundation stated.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

It was bedlam at the Western Wall plaza Wednesday morning as Reform rabbis and a women’s group held a prayer service-cum-demonstration there, with police trying to break it up and charges of violence flying from all sides.

Wednesday was the first day of the Hebrew month of Adar, and as is their usual practice on the quasi-festive day, called Rosh Chodesh in Hebrew, the feminist Women of the Wall (WoW) organization prayed at the site while donning, as religious Jewish men do, prayer shawls and phylacteries and publicly reading from the Torah, in defiance of Orthodox custom.

They were joined this time by hundreds of Reform rabbis from around the world who marched with Torah scrolls to the holy site, led by Labor MK Gilad Kariv, executive director of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism.

Their motto was, “A woman with a prayer shawl is not a criminal,” referring to a bill put forward earlier this month by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party requiring six months in jail or a NIS 10,000 fine for those who acted in violation of the Orthodox status quo at the Western Wall.

CEO of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) Hara Person said the march was part of the movement’s “fight to protect pluralism, equality, and democracy” in Israel, and to “proudly hold the Torah for all the women who are told they cannot worship freely and openly at the Kotel [Western Wall].”

As on the many previous occasions when WoW members have assembled there on Rosh Chodesh, ultra-Orthodox Jews screamed and cursed at the larger-than-usual group and blew whistles to try to drown out their mixed prayer service. Regular police and Border Police were called in and could be seen leading young ultra-Orthodox men away from the conflict zone.

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation that has charge of the site stated blamed Kariv for much of the problem.

The MK, said Foundation spokespeople, “took advantage of his [parliamentary] immunity and entered with a Torah scroll at the head of the group and led the demonstration to the heart of the Western Wall plaza, which caused a great commotion.”

Kariv said that when he tried to pass a Torah to the women’s section, Kotel guards prevented him from doing so and would not allow the women to read from any scroll.

The police also got involved in the egalitarian section of the plaza, where supporters of the extreme national religious Noam Party had set up an Orthodox prayer service with a partition to separate men and women, which is specifically absent from the liberal prayer area. Video clips online showed police manhandling at least one young man away.

The party said in a statement afterwards that “the police violently evicted dozens of worshipers from the southern extension of the Western Wall.”

“We call for the removal of the disputes and demonstrations and to let the site remain sacred and unifying,” the Foundation said in a statement following the incident. “We regret that this group saw fit to turn the Western Wall into a site of provocation without taking into account the consequences, the harm to the public’s feelings and the sanctity of the place.”