Brave Beauty Queen Who Refused To Go to Back of Israeli Bus
Brave and Beautiful: Doron Matalon wouldn?t back down when an ultra-Orthodox man tried to bully her into going to the back of a Jerusalem bus. Image by facebook
(Haaretz) — An ultra-Orthodox resident of Beit Shemesh was convicted of sexual harassment yesterday for calling a female Israel Defense Forces soldier a “prostitute” after she refused to move to the back of a bus.
The soldier, Doron Matalon, who has since started a modeling career, won second place in Tuesday night’s televised “Miss Israel” beauty pageant.
The incident took place in December 2011 on a gender-segregated bus in Jerusalem. Moshe Fuchs, 44, asked a woman paying the driver at the front of the bus to go to the back. Matalon, sitting in the front, told him women could sit wherever they wanted to. The defendant said to her, “Who asked you, prostitute, go to the back. You’re standing among yeshiva students and it’s a disgrace.”
At that point other ultra-Orthodox men joined Fuchs and yelled at her “prostitute” and “shikse” (gentile woman), Matalon said.
At that point she “felt threatened and a huge commotion began. I yelled out for the conductor to come quick, and two male conductors rushed in. They pushed him away from me and said: ‘Why are you shouting, she’s a soldier,’ but he continued to be abusive.”
Fuchs asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court to acquit him because the incident was “trivial.” Magistrate Hagit Kalmanovitch rejected this argument and said the defendant’s misconduct was grievous.
She wrote in her verdict that he had embarrassed the soldier in public “without an apology and without expressing regret.” The incident was also grave “because the defendant acted as part of a social practice of excluding women on segregated lines in particular and in public in general,” said the judge.
For more stories, go to Haaretz.com or to subscribe to Haaretz, click here and use the following promotional code for Forward readers: FWD13.
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
