The proposed egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall, which was meant to serve non-Orthodox Jews worldwide, looks like the latest casualty of the terror wave hitting Israel. Progress on the initiative – supported both by the Israeli government and Jewish organizations – had been slow in coming, even before tensions over Jerusalem’s holy sites…
The Women of the Wall said they would not attempt to smuggle a Torah scroll to the Kotel during this month’s Rosh Hodesh prayer service due to the current security situation. In a letter sent Sunday to Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, Women of the Wall Chairwoman Anat Hoffman said the women…
Thousands of people gathered at Jerusalem’s Western Wall amid heavy security for the holiday Priestly Blessing. The Western Wall Heritage Foundation estimated Wednesday morning’s crowd at 50,000, while media reports put the number in attendance at between 50,000 and 150,000. The mass blessing, called Birkat Kohanim in Hebrew, is held on an intermediate day during…
Israel Police officers detained a women’s rights activist at the Western Wall and confiscated her Torah scroll. Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, a Women of the Wall board member, was taken into police custody prior to a service Friday and released shortly afterwards, The Jerusalem Post reported. Women of the Wall runs gender egalitarian services at the…
Bonna Devora Haberman, the founder of Women of the Wall, a group pressing for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, has died. Haberman, a Canadian-born scholar, author and activist who lived in Israel and the United States, died Tuesday of cancer, The Jerusalem Post reported. Haberman taught at Harvard, Brandeis and the Hebrew University of…
For the second time in less than two months, a feminist prayer group has succeeded in bringing a Torah scroll into the women’s section of the Western Wall, in defiance of existing regulations at the Jewish holy site in Jerusalem. This morning, an organization known as Original Women of the Wall held a prayer service…
A male supporter of Women of the Wall was arrested after trying to pass a Torah scroll to the women’s section of the Western Wall during prayers for the new Jewish month. The partitions separating the men’s and women’s sections were locked together and metal barriers placed alongside them on Tuesday morning to prevent the…
On a sunny morning last month, I was swept into the women’s section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in a flurry of aggression directed at the Women of the Wall, the Israeli group fighting for women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s holiest site. (JTA) One of the group’s male supporters, Charlie Kalech, was strangled and thrown…
100% of profits support our journalism
