Could Tzipi Livni be sweetening feminists before dropping a bombshell? As discussed earlier on Forward Thinking, Justice Minister Livni has just announced that she is working on legislation to criminalize the exclusion of women from the public sphere. The timing is interesting — just as she could find herself in a very awkward position on…
The heads of the Reform and Conservative movements will demand that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein investigate the involvement of rabbis on the government payroll in Friday’s violent demonstrations at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Thousands of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators showed up at the Western Wall on Friday morning to protest against Women of the Wall, a…
Haredi Orthodox youth mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service. The youth, many of them students from haredi Orthodox yeshivot, had filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer…
Two of the prime players who have been locked in struggle over how Jews should be allowed to pray at the Western Wall have a complicated relationship with the recent grand compromise that Jewish Agency leader Natan Sharansky has offered to solve their dispute. Both Anat Hoffman, whose group, Women of the Wall, seeks to…
Thousands of girls from ultra-Orthodox seminaries in Jerusalem are expected to protest at the Western Wall on Friday, in response to a court ruling permitting the Women of the Wall prayer group to hold non-Orthodox services in the central plaza of the holy site. Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the head of the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community,…
As Women of the Wall members and supporters prepare to welcome the Hebrew month of Sivan on Friday morning, with Rosh Chodesh services in Jerusalem, its U.S. allies are getting ready to again demonstrate their support by doing the same. Solidarity services are scheduled for New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago. In Jerusalem, meanwhile, opposing…
Anticipating provocations by ultra-Orthodox individuals and groups at their monthly prayer service at the Western Wall on Friday, Women of the Wall have instructed supporters and activists planning to participate in the event not to “engage in conflict – verbal or physical” with any of the protesters. Ultra-Orthodox protesters have made a practice in recent…
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of a bold plan to provide equal space for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem are greatly exaggerated. But that doesn’t mean they may not become true. Which is why it is so important that American Jews find every bit of common ground they can…
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