Court Finds Against Haredi-Controlled City Government, Orders It To Pay Women Compensation After It Refused To Remove Haredi Modesty Signs

Four Modern Orthodox residents sued the City of Beit Shemesh for refusing to remove from public property haredi modesty signs ordering gender segregation and demanding certain types of "modest" dress.

Above: An illegal haredi modesty sign in Beit Shemesh ordering women to walk on the opposite side of the street from men

Updated at 11:43 am CST

Court Finds Against Haredi-Controlled City Government, Orders It To Pay Women Compensation After It Refused To Remove Haredi Modesty Signs
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

A Magistrates Court has just ruled against the haredi-controlled religiously-divided City of Beit Shemesh today, Ma’ariv reported.

Four Modern Orthodox residents sued the city for refusing to remove from public property haredi modesty signs ordering gender segregation and demanding certain types of "modest" dress.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the four women by Orly Erez-Lichovsky, an attorney for the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center.

Judge David Gidoni ruled that the city was severely negligent and ordered it to compensate the four women 15,000 shekels (about $3,750) each and pay court costs.

Gidoni said the haredi-controlled city government’s refusal to remove the modesty signs was a mortal blow to the rights of women in the city. He ordered the municipality to take down the signs and to compensate the four women because, he said, the distress the women were caused by the city’s refusal to remove the signs is severe.

The Sefardi haredi mayor of the city, Rabbi Moshe Abutbol of the Shas Party, has a long history of anti-secular and anti-Modern Orthodox behavior and statements, and a close advisor and other associates were arrested in a criminal conspiracy last year to throw the city’s elections to Abutbol. Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered the elections to be redone, but Abutbol won the revote. His advisor and other associates are awaiting trial.

Abutbol has long refused to remove the modesty signs, arguing that haredim will just repost them anyway and that removing the large, imposing signs costs the city too much money.

Update 11:43 am CST – The Jerusalem Post quotes extensively from Judge David Gidoni's ruling:

…“The signs were designed to restrict women from using public spaces simply because they were women... and constitute a severe injury to the rights of women to equality and respect. The signs are also humiliating,” Gidoni wrote in his ruling.

“The signs create the expectation that they should be adhered and are likely to create the expectation or understanding that the area where the sign is placed belongs, in effect, to one specific population group in which its norms are applicable.

“This expectation is likely in certain circumstances to encourage and assist the creation of a social atmosphere in which one could interpret the signs as obligating a person to obey them and even to bring about enforcement activities, sometimes through violence,” the judge wrote.

He said that from the facts brought to the court it appeared that the municipality and the mayor, Moshe Abutbul, accepted the presence of the signs and that they had not fulfilled their obligations to remove the signs.

“The municipality and the mayor chose not to take any steps to enforce the authority and obligations incumbent upon them to remove the signs... they absolved themselves from this obligation... and cannot be considered reasonable.”

Gidoni said the signs “bear an injurious and discriminatory message,” “ discriminate against women because they are women,” and cause “a severe injury to the dignity of man, equality and free choice and independence.” He added that the municipality’s behavior allowed the ongoing infraction of the rights of women, and allowed a situation in which sections of the city were not subject to the rule of law.

“This rewards violence and is likely to encourage further violence,” he added.…

[Hat Tip: Joel Katz.]

Comments

[Jeff]

"Abutbol has long refused to remove the modesty signs, arguing that haredim will just repost them anyway and that removing the large, imposing signs costs the city too much money."

Sadly, this is most likely true, especially as there seem never to be any negative consequences to Haredi antisocial behavior.

Now, cue the frum trolls: "They're only doing it to call attention to themselves! If they had happy marriages they wouldn't have time for this narrishkeit!"

[jancsibacsi]

Theese anthropoids are taking over the country
and everyone is scared to death from them just like isis.

[BS Resident]

why wasn't this a tort claim?
Why can't my wife (as a resident of Bet Shemesh) also get some cash, I'm sure she was just as offended by the sign?!?

[S M L]

It will take an uprising - something like an anti-Haredi pogrom - to put them in their place.

[Rebitzman]

Just keep filing the lawsuits.......

[MG]

LOL. It's the city's secular and dati taxpayers who are ending up paying these women's legal fees anyways.

[Jeff]

"LOL. It's the city's secular and dati taxpayers who are ending up paying these women's legal fees anyways."

That fits in just fine with your enormous sense of entitlement, doesn't it? It's your prerogative to live precisely as you wish, oppressing whomever you will, and it is the privilege of the secular "self-hating" Jews to pick up the tab.

[MG]

Exactly. Eat your heart out.

[Jeff]

I won't eat my heart out. I simply find it repugnant, as does everyone, Jew or gentile, of any decency or sensibility.

I take comfort in the knowledge that your world is collapsing. Of course, you think that because you breed like rabbits, that will somehow ensure your continuity. To the contrary, it is one of the factors bringing about your demise. You're crashing and burning before our eyes, but of course, you're too braiwashed to see it.

There is nothing left to do but to make popcorn, put up one's feet and enjoy the spectacle of the well-earned destruction of one of the most parasitic subcultures in all of human history.

[MG]

LOL. My world is expanding multiple times more in a year than your is in a decade. Predictions of our demise have been made since the 1940s. You'll still be predicting it in the 2040s after seeing another three decades of booming success. We ain't going away, bro, like us or not we're here to stay. You, on the other hand, will have become completely assimilated into the Christian society you live in to become indistinguishable from the average gentile. Your kiddies will be homosexual marrying druggies.

But don't worry, you just keep paying taxes.

[Jeff]

Like all fundamentalists, you confuse quantity with quality. You people have been predicting our demise since the Haskalah. We're still here as well - but you can no longer provide for your irresponsibly growing numbers, and you refuse to educate your children in a manner that would allow them to function outside of your cloistered world.

We'll see who is left standing at the end.

[MG]

It is fundamentalist secularists such as yourself who not only have no future but have no present other than to bear witness to your drug infused offspring shack it off with a different girlfriend each week and then be left with child support payments determined after a DNA test.

Don't forget to keep up with the child support checks for all four exes.