"…In order to understand you better, I have read your book, Hilkhot Hakotel, cover to cover. In your letter you say that you are a moderator, bridging the gap between extremes, but your book was written by someone whose world view is very extreme. How else do you explain the fact that in 530 pages you devote only seven lines to the subject of women? Unfortunately, you spent this precious space deliberating on how women should not gaze at the Torah during their menstrual cycle.…"
Above: Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz
Women of the Wall's head Anat Hoffman, who is also a Reform rabbi, writes in the Jerusalem Post about the government-appointed Chief Rabbi of the Kotel (Western Wall) and other Holy Sites Shmuel Rabinowitz:
…In order to understand you better, I have read your book, Hilkhot Hakotel, cover to cover. In your letter you say that you are a moderator, bridging the gap between extremes, but your book was written by someone whose world view is very extreme. How else do you explain the fact that in 530 pages you devote only seven lines to the subject of women? Unfortunately, you spent this precious space deliberating on how women should not gaze at the Torah during their menstrual cycle.
Your book shows hundreds of photographs of the Western Wall throughout history, and there is not one photo of a woman. There is no photo of a woman holding a baby, a mother rejoicing at her son’s bar mitzva, a female soldier, or of a girl wrapped in a tallit for the first time at her bat mitzva. It requires special acrobatics to take so many photographs at the Wall and not have a single woman pictured. Can you imagine, brother, how it feels to read a book about the family and see that all of the sisters and mothers and grandmothers have been excluded?…