Orthodox Mob Harasses Teen Girl In Jerusalem Over ‘Immodest’ Clothing
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A haredi Orthodox mob chased a teenage girl down a main thoroughfare in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh due to her “immodest” attire.
City residents have been complaining about religiously motivated violence in the Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet neighborhood outside Jerusalem for years. Extremists there frequently clash with police attempting to remove signs calling for public gender segregation.
In a video of Monday’s incident, the girl can be seen running down Nahar Hayarden Street, chased by what appears to be dozens of screaming men in haredi Orthodox garb. Some residents of the neighborhood have complained that they have been harassed and pushed to leave the neighborhood by the extremists, who recently announced a “war” on formerly haredi residents who frequent the neighborhood.
In response to the attack, dozens of secular and national-religious residents held a rally Tuesday protesting the lack of security.
“In one of the neighborhoods, every time I pass through to go to work the children throw stones at me because I am not dressed modestly,” one demonstrator told Walla News.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO