Dirty Prayerbooks? Blame Women
Image by wikimedia commons
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen May 17, 2012
Ah, the holy tears of Jewish women who weep while praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Not holy, says the holy site’s chief rabbi. Instead, says Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, women’s tears are responsible for the high level of fecal contamination found in the prayer books at the Wall, or kotel, even those that are found on the men’s side of the high mechitzah.
If anyone had any doubt that the man in charge of Judaism’s holiest site — Rabinovitch not only enforces the regulation banning women from praying together with a sefer Torah in the women’s section, but also seeks to segregate men and women throughout the entire large plaza that forms the approach to the kotel — should not be in his important post, then this assertion should make that perfectly clear. His statement underscores just how backwards attitudes toward women have become in the fervently Orthodox community. It also makes clear that it isn’t the women’s tears that are full of feces.
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
