Israel’s prime minister is keeping gender segregation at Judaism’s holiest site

At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site, women and men pray in sharply divided separate sections. There is no intermingling. That separation has long rankled progressive Jews in Israel and around the world.

Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel and the West spent four years hammering out a deal with the Israeli government to expand access to the Western Wall. On Sunday the deal abruptly collapsed, raising new concerns about the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community’s stranglehold on the country’s political system.

What’s at stake here is who gets to determine both who is a Jew and what is legitimate prayer. By imposing continued gender segregation at the wall, the ultra-Orthodox have flexed their political as well as theological muscles in the face of the rest of the Jewish world.

The deal’s collapse is the latest indication that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can’t control his country’s far-right. That could open an enormous rift with the wider Jewish world, which is much less religious. The Jewish Agency, a century-old organization which encourages immigration to Israel, cancelled an upcoming celebratory dinner with Netanyahu over it.

“The government of Israel has taken certain actions that threaten the Jewish people, and we want our communities back home to understand that support for Israel does not necessarily mean support for the government of Israel,” Jewish Agency Chair Michael Siegel told Israel’s daily Ha’aretz newspaper on Monday.

Single gender areas of prayer have long existed at the wall; this would have set aside a few feet of space allowing men and women to pray together. When the decision was made in January of 2016, it was hailed as a historic victory by Reform and Conservative Jewish groups, as well as the activist group Women of the Wall, which has lobbied for expanded access to the wall since 1989.

But then nothing happened. Progressive Jews filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court to push for the project. Netanyahu’s government was due to respond by Sunday. Instead he halted the plans altogether. His decision is being called a “freeze” but all reports indicate it is, in reality, a total unraveling of the idea.

“It took time, but we have succeeded in persuading the government to cancel the deal, which damaged the Kotel and the Jewish status quo,” Uri Ariel of the right-wing Jewish Home Party said in a statement, using the Hebrew name for the Western Wall.

Ariel may be pleased, but elsewhere there were explosive statements of anger. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the abandonment of Zionism. The Western Wall belongs to all Jews,” said former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in a statement. “This despicable decision sends a sharp message of division and alienation to Diaspora Jewry.”

The battle over prayer at Judaism’s holiest site is a skirmish in a larger war over gender, secularism, religious pluralism and the control the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate has over most aspects of Israeli life.

Just last week Renee Rabinowitz, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, won a gender discrimination lawsuit agains the Israeli national airline, El Al. Rabinowitz was asked to switch her seat when an ultra-Orthodox man refused to sit next to her, citing modesty and his religious needs. Rabinowitz protested at first, but she ultimately moved. After the flight, she was convinced by feminist activist Anat Hoffman, the founder of the group Women of the Wall which has long lobbied for mixed prayer at the Western Wall, to sue the airline.

In the past six years, there have also been a number of major cases revolving around the idea of segregating public buses by gender, in a nod to the dictates of the ultra-Orthodox.

The ultra-Orthodox also control all Jewish marriages, burials, and conversions. That means there is no civil marriage in Israel, nor funeral services. In the case of conversions it means that a very small group of rabbis have the right to determine who can legitimately call him or herself a Jew.

The Western Wall is a potent symbol to Jews. The last remnant of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, it has become a pilgrimage site in a religion with few other such concrete symbols or other such universally recognized places of worship. There’s a reason that Ivanka Trump stopped at the wall almost immediately upon arrival in Israel.

The question of women’s rights to prayer at the wall has long been an issue in Israel. In 1989 the protest group Women of the Wall formed to agitate for greater access to the holy site.

The group stages dramatic protests to underscore what women are not allowed to do in prayer at the wall — namely, to wrap themselves in a Jewish prayer shawl (a talit), carry a torah scroll, and to raise their voices, literally, in prayer.

As a result, the Women of the Wall face significant harassment and intimidation from the ultra-Orthodox — or haredi — men in prayer on the men’s side of the wall. Women’s efforts to pray (in the women’s section) are often purposefully drowned out by the men who use loudspeakers to disrupt women’s prayers, and ensure women’s voices can literally not be heard.

Hoffman, the head of Women of the Wall, told news agencies yesterday, “It’s a terrible day for women in Israel when the prime minister sacrifices their rights while kowtowing to a handful of religious extremists, who want to enforce their religious customs while intentionally violating the rights of the majority of the Jewish world.”

Hoffman’s sentiments were echoed across the Jewish diaspora on Monday as leaders decried the decision to privilege ultra-Orthodox rules over the desire of progressive Jews to pray together.