As Sukkot Approaches, Jerusalem Activists Worry About More Illegal Haredi Gender Segregation

In previous years, police have allowed the gender segregation to take place – including haredim blocking the main entrances to Mea Shearim and only allowing one gender to enter at each entrance. Haredim hired private guards and appointed ushers to enforce the gender segregation, and violence against people who failed to go along with it was reported.

Gender segregation at the entrance to the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem. By law, prayer areas of the holy site are gender segregated, but the plaza behind them is not. Haredi rabbis, however, instituted gender segregation there anyway, despite the law.

As Sukkot Approaches, Jerusalem Activists Worry About More Illegal Haredi Gender Segregation
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

In a letter reportedly sent to police on Monday, an attorney representing Jerusalem city council member Rachel Azaria complained that police had not answered her previous questions about its preparations for the upcoming Sukkot holiday.

Yeshivas and synagogues, primarily in the Mea Shearim neighborhood but also in other haredi neighborhoods in the city, attempt to gender segregate streets and sidewalks during the holiday’s large Simchat Beit Hashoeva celebrations – something Israel’s High Court of Justice has ruled to be illegal.

In previous years, police have allowed the gender segregation to take place – including haredim blocking the main entrances to Mea Shearim and only allowing one gender to enter at each entrance. Haredim hired private guards and appointed ushers to enforce the gender segregation, and violence against people who failed to go along with it was reported.

Police did little to protect those victims and did nothing to stop the gender segregation, prompting Azaria to file a petition with the High Court of Justice and the High Court to rule in her favor.

Deputy police spokeswoman Shlomit Bajshi told the Jerusalem Post that police had not yet received Azaria’s letter, and that there were no special preparations being made by police for Mea Shearim other than the usual increase in police presence that takes place during Jewish holidays. However, she pledged that police would enforce the law – or at least some of them.

“We will not allow disturbances and we will protect the rights of all citizens,” she reportedly said, making no specific mention of the forced gender segregation.

“I hope that we can depend on police,” Azaria told the Post Monday. “They got used to working with haredim, but now they need to enforce the law. The time has come for them to take responsibility.…The court was very clear, [the police] can’t play around.”

Azaria notes that police can’t simply try to interpret the High Court’s ruling out of existence because the court’s ruling included details of forbidden actions – for example, a prohibition against using burlap sacks to create temporary barriers for gender segregation. (In other words, the court precluded police from using a legal fiction that says that such barriers are only temporary and issuing a warning to haredim to remove them within a certain number of days – generally by the day after the holiday is over.)

Azaria said that if the gender segregation is allowed to continue this year, she will go back to the High Court with a new petition to get it stopped.

In response to her petition last year, Jerusalem’s secular Mayor Nir Barkat ejected Azaria from his coalition and stripped her of her assigned portfolios. A spokesperson for Barkat said he took this action even though he and the coalition are opposed to forced gender segregation, claiming that a member of the ruling coalition cannot file a High Court petition against the city and expect to remain in the coalition.

Barkat’s move was widely viewed as a nakedly political ploy meant to placate haredi politicians.

[Hat Tip: Burich.]

Comments

[seymour]

the chuzpha really is that the heridiem did nothing did not sacrifice to get the wall into Israeli hands but once other did the sacrifice they want to control it

amazing

[LoveBirds]

As Sukkot Approaches, Jerusalem Activists Worry About More Illegal Haredi Gender Segregation

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Somehow they survived it in the past so too will they again. The man and woman will be reunited after a brief period of being separated.

[David]

Unfortunately they are taking Moslem practise and absorbing it into "Jewish" practise. They should just stick to the Halacha.