The city-employed modesty squad reportedly demanded Likud remove campaign signs for all of the female candidates because those signs had on them pictures of – women. And while showing a photo of a modestly clad woman was not a haredi modesty violation in 1920 (or, for that matter, in 1970), it is a haredi modesty violation now, and haredim quite frequently vandalize public buses, bus shelters and even product packaging in supermarkets if women – even modestly clad women, even just women’s faces – are shown on them.
Above: One of the campaign signs, this one for Miri Regev
Haredi City Of Bnei Brak Tries To Illegally Force Political Party To Remove Campaign Signs Showing Women Candidates’ Faces
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Likud Party officials and local Likud activists set up a polling place in a community center in the haredi city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv to allow local party members to vote to determine the party’s Knesset list for the upcoming election.
While Likud is not a religious party, its leadership is courting haredim, and a surprisingly large number of haredim vote for Likud rather than vote for haredi political parties. Most do so quietly so their neighbors and rabbis don’t find out, but some are open about it and some of them are party members and vote in things like party primaries.
According to a blog post by Allison Kaplan Sommer in Ha’aretz that is based on a report by the haredi news website Kikar HaShabbat, as the local Likud activists and party officials were setting up the polls, representatives from the haredi city’s government arrived. These weren’t elected officials or building inspectors – they were members of the city’s official modesty squad that patrols the city and enforces haredi modesty rules.
The modesty squad reportedly demanded Likud remove campaign signs for all of the female candidates because those signs had on them pictures of – women. And while showing a photo of a modestly clad woman was not a haredi modesty violation in 1920 (or, for that matter, in 1970), it is a haredi modesty violation now, and haredim quite frequently vandalize public buses, bus shelters and even product packaging in supermarkets if women – even modestly clad women, even just women’s faces – are shown on them.
The Bnei Brak modesty squad told Likud officials that they had been ordered to compel Likud to remove the signs posted at the poll’s entrance – even though the female candidates were modestly dressed and only shown from the neck up.
The Likud officials called Yaakov Vider, who is in charge of haredi outreach for Likud and who sits on Likud’s oversight committee for the primary.
Vider reportedly told the modesty squad that they could not remove the signs or otherwise change or interrupt the primary voting process because of them because doing so would be a clear violation of Israeli law that forbids exclusion of women and gender discrimination.
The city’s modesty squad didn’t care. It continued to insist the posters be removed, and it threatened to close the polls and stop the voting if Likud did not accede to these demands immediately and remove the posters.
At that point, Likud voters furious at the modesty squad’s meddling got into a heated shouting match with modesty squad members.
Police were called and as so often happens in a country that increasing feels like a third world banana republic, police said the city had the right to remove the signs.
Vider told them they were wrong and explained the law to them.
Police called their headquarters located in the neighboring city of Ramat Gan and were told that Vider was correct – the city did not have the right have the right to interfere in any way with the voting, and the city also did not have the right to remove the campaign posters with women pictured on them.
“I am very happy that the officials from the Likud didn’t give up, fought the municipality and the police who first arrived on the scene. It shows that the message is starting to penetrate on every level that exclusion of women is illegal and unacceptable. It doesn't always translate to the people on the ground but we see that great progress is being made - even in Bnei Brak, even in the ultra-Orthodox sector. This is an important message,” Orly Erez-Likhovski, the head of the legal department of the Israel Religious Action Center, which has repeatedly brought legal actions against the government to stop this type of discrimination, told Ha’aretz. “We’ve come a long way and we are in a very different place than we were two or three years ago,” she said.
Be that as it may, Likud’s head, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly skirted High Court of Justice and other court rulings with regard to this and other issues.
For example, when the High Court said that enforced public gender segregation on the streets of Mea Shearim during the Sukkot holiday was illegal, Netanyahu allowed haredim to remove the fences put in place to separate the sexes and replace them with similar fences set up in a similar way for the purpose of crowd safety. The fences were used to force gender segregation, and Netanyahu and his police turned blind eyes.