The group took out advertisements in the local papers and launched a Facebook campaign in both English and Hebrew, all centering around an image of an ultra-Orthodox woman sitting with her young daughter looking through a magazine. The girl in the ad asks: “Mommy, why did they erase the little girl’s face?”
Top: The new anti-madness ad from local Beit Shemesh moderate Zionist Orthodox residents. Bottom: A 2012 ad from a Beit Shemesh publication advertising Purim costumes with; the little girls' faces were blurred out.
Allison Kaplan Sommer reports in Ha'aretz:
…This year, the group of [Beit Shemesh moderate Zionist Orthodox] residents, which includes both women and men, decided to do more than just complain [about the blotting out of women and girls in local newspapers] – they decided to launch a small-scale awareness campaign aimed at both the national-religious [i.e., Zionist Orthodox] and ultra-Orthodox communities.
The group took out advertisements in the local papers and launched a Facebook campaign in both English and Hebrew, all centering around an image of an ultra-Orthodox woman sitting with her young daughter looking through a magazine. The girl in the ad asks: “Mommy, why did they erase the little girl’s face?”
At the bottom of the photo is the question: “What message are we sending our boys and girls?” and the tagline of the campaign printed on a stop sign “Stop the madness.”
And what is happening in Beit Shemesh does increasingly look like madness. One member of the group, Miriam Zussman, snapped a photo of a local women’s health clinic, where on the sign, the word “woman” had been spray-painted black.
The sign illustrates the very slippery slope the city is sliding down, says Zussman.
“Our plea is to 'bring back the sanity' – first there are no women's bodies, then no faces, then no hands, and then even the word ‘woman’ is erased.”
It is the moderate national-religious community's responsibility to stop the slide, she says.
“The mainstream national-religious community has been slowly and insidiously accepting haredi norms on the erasure of women from public sphere including newspapers, phone books and newsletters. Right now, there are virtually no publications in Beit Shemesh that will run a picture of women including the English ‘Shemeshphone’ phone book which is in every home.”…