Ahead of next Thursday’s scheduled prayer service, Jerusalem’s Police
Commander Major-General Yossi Parente told the Women of the Wall that he
has added another prayer they are forbidden to publicly recite at the
Kotel (Western Wall) – Kaddish, the memorial prayer. Parente wrote that after a discussion with Deputy Attorney General Sarit
Dana last month, they determined that the strict instructions issued
almost eight years ago by the Justice Ministry but never enforced were
"completely valid.” Women caught saying Kaddish out loud would now be arrested.
Israel Police Warn Women Of The Wall They Will Be Arrested – For Saying Kaddish
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Ahead of next Thursday’s scheduled prayer service, Jerusalem’s Police Commander Major-General Yossi Parente told the Women of the Wall that he has added another prayer they are forbidden to publicly recite at the Kotel (Western Wall) – Kaddish, the memorial prayer.
The women go to the Kotel once a month to pray. They were already banned from wearing tallits, prayer shawls, that are thought to look like the one’s men wear or that are worn in a manner that men customarily wear them. They are also forbidden from reading from a Torah scroll and from having audible communal prayer.
According to Ynet, Parente sent a letter to Women of the Wall Chairwoman Anat Hoffman claiming that police planned for to enforce the law regarding women’s prayer at the holy site according to a strict interpretation first suggested by Israel’s Justice Ministry in 2005.
Parente wrote that after a discussion with Deputy Attorney General Sarit Dana last month, they determined that the strict instructions issued almost eight years ago by the Justice Ministry but never enforced were "completely valid.”
Hoffman said she was shocked to receive Parente’s letter, and insisted that she and Women of the Wall members would say Kaddish "devotedly and with great intention" no matter what Parente says. She also blamed the new police crackdown on the Kotel’s haredi rabbi, who has moved the holy site from a largely pluralistic but still Orthodox site to a heavily haredi one.
"Preventing women from saying Kaddish is a foolish act stemming only from considerations of hegemony and narrow-mindedness by the Western Wall rabbi," Hoffman told Ynet.
Hoffman noted that all over the world, women are allowed to say Kaddish, including in many Orthodox synagogues. She also pointed out that revoking that right at the Kotel in the month that includes Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Day of Remembrance for Israeli Fallen Soldiers, and Israeli Independence Day is infuriating.
"These are days which symbolize more than anything the unity around a shared Jewish fate and the personal and national price paid by each and every one of us. Preventing bereaved mothers and women from saying Kaddish is callous and lacks compassion,” she told Ynet.
Dozens of members of the Women of the Wall have been arrested over the past six months while trying to pray at the Kotel.
Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled almost 8 years ago, banning women from wearing “men’s” tallits and from reading from the Torah. But that ruling gave the government one year to set up a suitable and equal prayer space where women could do those things. But successive Israeli governments have failed to so, causing many legal experts to believe the government lacks the legal power to ban the religious practices of Women of the Wall.