RJ Blog

Today I am ending a three-week trip to the United States, and tomorrow I will return home to Israel (assuming the El Al strike is over). This has been a particularly emotional trip as I was in Boston the day of Marathon. I saw firsthand how resilient the people of Boston are in a crisis. We all send our thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. I spoke at nearly a dozen synagogues and universities during my three weeks in the United States. This trip was an opportunity for me to start explaining in person to our supporters [...]

Imagine making aliyah – leaving your work, family and friends behind. Making a bold journey – only to be rejected by the Israeli authorities. In the past couple of weeks we lived an intense drama with one of our brave olim (new immigrants), who was arrested and almost deported. We managed to stop the deportation just as he was boarding the plane. Kirk Maxfield, who had a Reform conversion in 1993, was arrested at his home in Haifa for overstaying his tourist visa. Mr. Maxfield had applied for citizenship, but was not permitted to stay in the country while his [...]

A unique gathering happened this morning at the Western Wall. During Women of the Wall’s usual Rosh Chodesh prayer service in the women’s section of the Kotel, we were fortunate to be supported by some very special visitors. Veterans from the IDF’s famed Paratrooper Battalion 66, the men who liberated the Western Wall in 1967, were with our supporters in the men’s section. These men are living legends and among Israel’s modern heroes. It was only after the prayer service was over and the paratroopers had left that the police detained ten women, including myself, for committing the crime of [...]

An open letter to Rabbi Miri Gold Dear Rabbi Gold, I’m writing you today to beg for more of your patience.  I know you and your congregation, Birkat Shalom, believed that winning an unprecedented verdict in May 2012 meant that you would receive a state salary like all male Orthodox rabbis in the Gezer region.  Our whole movement in Israel and abroad celebrated this achievement; however it is now clear to me that the celebrations were premature.

UPDATE: Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, to review restrictions on women’s prayer at the Western Wall and suggest ways to make the site more accommodating to all Jews! Keep following RACblog for more updates throughout the week!

Policeman: Open your coat. Is this a shawl you are wearing? Woman: Are shawls a problem? Policeman: Shawls are allowed. I am looking for a tallit. Woman: Why? Policeman: As of this morning the Rabbi of the Wall is forbidding tallitot at the Kotel. Woman: But wait, over there is a man carrying a tallit? Policeman: The decree applies only to women. Open your bag please. I need to search for a tallit. 

This week we want to shed light on one of the most vulnerable populations in Israel. During the last five to 10 years, thousands of asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa have crossed the Sinai Desert to reach Israel, on a perilous and heroic journey, like our own Exodus from Egypt. Scores of African refugees, trying to escape civil war, forced conscription, and other forms of political oppression in their home countries have fled to Egypt. As life for Africans in Egypt became increasingly dangerous, some of them chose to go north towards Israel; a country they felt would be a [...]

Last Tuesday I was arrested when I took a group of over two hundred women to the Western Wall to pray together in the women’s section. I was arrested for disturbing the peace and endangering the public good by wearing my tallit and saying the Shema out loud. It was a traumatic experience. I was pulled along the ground by my wrists, strip-searched, shackled by the hands and feet and left to sleep on the floor of a jail cell with nothing to keep me warm but my tallit. The treatment I received was designed to make women scared of [...]

Add your name to a petition urging the Israeli government to ensure that oversight of the Kotel includes a range of Jewish views and voices and protects gender equality. The Western Wall in Jerusalem, in the words and Yiddish accent of Issac Bashevis Singer, is “like any other Veilin Vall (wailing wall).” It is the only distinct and concrete holy place for the Jewish people. The site of the Western Wall is run by an ultra-Orthodox group of bureaucrats and rabbis who are dictating the life choices of all who enter. Pope Benedict XVI was lucky in 2009, to be allowed [...]

The holidays are over and Israel is open for business. The relative quiet that characterizes the chaggim has been replaced by the type of chaos that only politics can create. Israel is going to have early elections on January 22, 2013. The Knesset will be dissolved and Israelis will have a chance to vote for a new government. Will the next government be ready to make the hard choices necessary to push forward the changes we need in so many areas of our civil life?

I once spoke at a synagogue in the United States, when I was confronted by a woman. She had come with her 16-year-old grandson to hear me talk about IRAC’s work fighting for pluralism. She had brought him along because she wanted him to connect to Israel. She told me that he loved my message. But as a result, he wanted nothing to do with Israel. 

I shudder to think how many times I became so immersed in my desire to make everyone I meet push back against the Orthodox monopoly in Israel that I also pushed them away from [...]

Ariella Marsden is a hero. This brave 15-year-old girl from the town of Beit Shemesh recently won a landmark court case that shook the ultra-Orthodox world. One day, riding home from school on a public bus, Ariella took a seat in the front of the bus. A few ultra-Orthodox men also boarded the bus and stood next to her. Then the bus driver asked her to move from her seat in the front to the back of the bus where she had to stand for the duration of her journey.  Seeing the sign posted on the bus saying that passengers [...]

Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin apologized to Jamal Julany, one of the victims of a racist attack in Zion Square, during his visit to the 17-year-old. “We are sorry,” said Rivlin, a Likud Party leader. He went on to say, “It is hard to see you hospitalized because of an inconceivable act” and “What happened is the responsibility of every leader and member of Knesset.” The Jewish month of Elul calls us to evaluate our actions and mend our ways to avoid the same mistakes next year. An honest evaluation will reveal that this unprovoked attack on three Arab youths by [...]

Yesterday four women were detained at the Western Wall, each for wearing a tallit. The authorities say they were disturbing the public peace according to regulation 201 A4 of the Israeli legal code. The punishment for this crime is six months in prison. They also broke regulation 287A by performing a religious act that “offends the feelings of others.” The punishment for this crime is up to two years in prison.