The film night did not go ahead after the men, labeled “pure evil” by one media outlet, protested.
By World Israel News Staff
Several men disrupted an event for Haredi women and girls in Jerusalem on Saturday night, in apparent protest over gender segregation.
The event, a movie night showing films produced exclusively for Haredi women, took place in Kiryat Menachem – a mixed neighborhood with religious and secular Jews.
According to the Haaretz daily, the men prevented the event from going ahead.
Kobi Bornstein of the haredi Mishpacha magazine labeled the disruption as “evil.”
“Pure evil. There is no other way to define it. Destroying the holiday for women and girls who came to the screening separately just because it doesn’t suit you. Tell me more about enlightenment, liberalism, women’s rights, and democracy,” Bronstein said.
Journalist Yinon Magal lambasted the protesters’ double standards. “You will never see a group of privileged men disrupting a secular women’s event or a women-only race in Tel Aviv. This only happens when it comes to religious women or girls. Suddenly it’s not ‘misogyny’, and it’s not ‘paternalism’. It’s all kinds of hypocrisy in one picture.”
Another Israeli journalist, Aryeh Ehrlich, called the disruption “heinous” by “monsters without a heart” and a “harassment of haredi women and girls”.
“Make no mistake, the majority of the left is not like that,” he said.
Social media users also blasted the protesters, with Israel National News citing one as saying that they should “go to maternity wards next” to protest gender segregation there. Another suggested they should protest Muslim gender segregated events in Jaffa. “Then we’ll see who the heroes are,” the post said.
Last week, left-wing demonstrators – among them members of the Brothers in Arms protest group –physically and verbally attacked Jewish worshippers praying throughout Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Demonstrators who converged on a prayer session in Dizengoff Square asserted that the worshippers were breaking the law due to the erection of a small mechitzah – a divider separating men and women, which is mandatory for Orthodox prayer.
However, police had determined that the small bamboo frame decorated with Israeli flags constructed by Rosh Yehudi, the group which organized the prayers, was not large enough to constitute a violation of a policy barring gender separation in public spaces.