Separate, Not Equal: Religious Women Against Gender Segregation in Netanyahu’s Israel

Gender segregation has become almost the norm in academia, cultural performances, and leisure activities in Israel – but we are now seeing the first signs of religious and ultra-Orthodox women who have joined criticism of the phenomenon

The existing laws are not relevant, said the driver who sent the girls to the back of the bus and asked them to cover themselves. “They should be thankful that they were even allowed to get on the bus,” he said. The directness may be extraordinary, but it is a direct and blatant result of the government’s consistent messaging over the past decade: women have a responsibility not to offend men – by their presence, with their voice, or by not dressing “modestly.”

Gender segregation has become almost the norm in academia, cultural performances, and leisure activities. The accumulation of recent cases – and the tailwind provided by the government – indicate that these are not random acts conducted by “extremists,” but rather a consistent erosion of the legitimacy of a female presence in the public sphere. The borders are moving.

It is against this backdrop that we are seeing the first signs pointing to another, no less meaningful change: On social networks and elsewhere, religious and ultra-Orthodox women have joined in criticism of gender segregation and warnings about its creeping expansion – something that until now was mainly the prerogative of feminists and secular organizations. If we look beyond their diverse backgrounds and arguments, we can draw some common insights: The radicalization of the issue of modesty and separation in religious society is a process that even those within that society who are not interested in it cannot escape from. The peer pressure is too great. Also, their suspicion of the way these “adjustments” are presented as if they will serve them is based on personal experience and intimate familiarity with their communities. They understand the big picture, perhaps better than secular women.

Segregation is a euphemism for tightening control over women. Some religious and ultra-Orthodox women make their criticism openly heard; many others still fear the social cost, which can be manifested in all sorts of ways, for example, through harassment of children in educational institutions or creating difficulties in finding a match.

Estee Rieder-Indursky studied at the Beit Yaakov Seminary for Girls and received a doctorate from Tel Aviv University. She is an activist for gender equality, but she is not “modern Orthodox. She describes herself as “Haredi, exactly like my grandmother.” The radicalization of separation is a phenomenon that has developed over the past few years: stickers that cover images of women on bottles of hair color, women being sent to the back of the bus, separate queues at the bank, separation at amusement parks from the age of three. “That’s what’s modern,” she quips.

Rieder-Indursky also emphasizes another point: It is not just Haredi women who have the responsibility to fight against gender separation. “Today, everyone understands that the exclusion of women from Haredi political parties, Mehadrin kosher buses, and erasing images of women are a stain on Israeli democracy.”

Attorney Nitzan Caspi Shiloni heads the legal department at the Center for Women’s Justice, an organization that defends women’s rights in the religious legal system. She is also a doctoral student in the gender program at Bar Ilan University. Caspi Shiloni says that religious women also recognize the importance of liberal values alongside religious values. Years of arguing cases in rabbinical courts have taught her how dangerous it is to “turn religious practice into binding law in a democratic country.”

At the same time, she admits that she “didn’t think the struggle against separation was the most important or urgent.” In 2019, when there was a struggle against municipal funding for gender-segregated cultural performances for Haredim, she was mainly concerned about a conservative backlash. Today, she is vehemently opposed to any segregation.

“There is an ongoing campaign to try to instill religious practices in the public sphere,” says Caspi Shiloni. “These are no longer local initiatives; we are seeing government offices that are telling women when they can dip in a spring. If previously I deliberated on issues of multi-culturalism and thought that perhaps a non-liberal minority should be given some measure of autonomy, it is now clear that this minority is now using the political power it has gained to attack liberal rights in general. I know what it is like to stand in a rabbinical court – and the government wants to expand the powers of the rabbinical courts – without any constitutional defense of basic values. It’s a completely different story.”

Last summer, the religious organization “Chochmat Nashim” (Women’s Wisdom) began collecting testimonies of rabbinical courts in Israel and overseas and publishing them on its website. According to Shoshana eats Jaskoll, director of Chochmat Nashim, the pace at which the organization is receiving testimonies has increased lately, and in total, it now has some 450. Another project is creating a photo bank of religious and Orthodox women shot in situations from daily life. “Erasure of women was once something that only the most extreme Hassidic groups engaged in, but in recent years it has become common in the religious mainstream in the name of ‘modesty,” says Keats Jaskoll.

Keats Jaskoll’s objections to gender segregation are in part based on her firsthand experiences in Bet Shemesh where she lives. “I know the path, and I’m very scared about the next stops. Once we open the door to separation between men and women outside of the synagogue, the ultra-Orthodox won’t stop. I saw it happen in Bet Shemesh. There are men here who think it is their right not to see women in the public sphere. We are allowed to be there only if we don’t disturb them. This exclusion has a tangible price: women can’t be served if they can’t be seen.” The growing separation, she adds, “is not something that a lot of Haredi women don’t support. They are afraid that they will be the ones to pay the price.”

Like Keats Jaskoll, Eve Finkelstein lives in Bet Shemesh and has closely followed the situation there for almost two decades. “There is a perception that says segregation is an internal Haredi affair. That’s nonsense. There are women here who are afraid to get on a bus because they will be cursed and spat at if they try to sit at the front of the bus. Exclusion of women is an interest of the politicians and of Haredi men. With more and more women studying and going out to work, they feel they need to tighten their control over women.

‘Someone has to cook’

The understanding that gender separation is also a question of political power (and primarily the absence of political power). Two weeks ago, Efrat Shukrun, an activist with Nivcharot – Haredi Women’s Movement, an ultra-Orthodox feminist group, published a long chain on social media that took a deep dive into the world of supposedly egalitarian segregation at the municipal swimming pool in Elad. Women can swim every day from eight in the morning to shortly before four in the afternoon, while men can use the pool from then until nine in the evening, and on Fridays.

“If you go out to work and you aren’t a teacher or nursery teacher, then you don’t really have the opportunity to use the pool, and neither is there an option to swim at night when it’s not so hot,” explains Shukrun. “Men, on the other hand, get another day because the logic is that on Fridays, a woman’s place is at home. After all, someone has to cook.”

Shukrun tells Haaretz that the Elad pool hours are an example of how decisions are taken “and how segregation is becoming more extreme.” She remembers holidays at hotels catering to the ultra-Orthodox, where every family would sit together at shows. Today, even that has changed and become extreme,” she says. In the same way, drawings of girls have disappeared from textbooks and recreational books.

“I go to gender-separated performances, but they are almost always just separate and not equal,” says Shukrun. “There is a limited amount of resources – scholarships, pool hours, seats close to the stage – and no one is taking us into account. If there is a pilot program for separation at springs, in a few years, that will be the rule. We won’t be able to go as a family.”

“I’m very scared of the gender separation that is being advanced by a government that doesn’t exactly have women at the top of its agenda,” says Michal Avraham, from Modi’in, who is part of a faction of religious women inside a group called Bonot Alternativa (Building an Alternative). “Religious families will find it hard to travel and to go out together, and at the end of the day, women will be excluded from activities. The pattern we saw on buses for the ultra-Orthodox will repeat itself here as well. A small and limited experiment will lead to a situation where men tell women not to bathe in springs. Once an authorization in principle has been given, it won’t be possible to control segregation. We all know where this is headed.”

A position paper written by Bonot Alternativa states that the segregated bathing pilot “was presented as an attempt to respond to the needs of religious and ultra-Orthodox women, when in fact it is aimed at male appropriation of these spaces. The springs in the national parks are the scene of a male takeover. Many springs serve in practice as ritual baths for men, and women and families are pushed out. Segregated bathing does not guarantee protection of women’s rights.”

Women who grew up in religious and ultra-Orthodox families (some of whom no longer meet that classification) have been posting on social media memories from another, not-so-distant era when both genders would do things together. In a Facebook post, former MK Tehila Friedman wrote about Haredi boys who bothered her daughter at a spring a few days ago. “It took a few minutes for the penny to drop that the splashing was becoming increasingly violent and that they were trying to force her out of the water to ‘enable’ Haredi men to go in the spring. By the way, she was fully dressed,” Friedman wrote. The lesson was clear to her: “There is a very thin line between allocating hours for women and kicking out women who bathe outside of their hours.” In the current reality where images of women are being erased regardless of what they are wearing, we must, she says, oppose “any intervention by the state when it comes to separation in the public sphere.”

The liberal public would do well to listen to the religious women opposing growing gender separation. They are skeptical about the “truths” that come from above and are being promoted by rabbis and politicians. The desire for separation is not uniform among the religious public; it doesn’t necessarily serve women, and the government stamp of approval will expand its scope to other areas of life. Moreover, Knesset members Idit Silman and Limor Son Har-Melech, who prevented some religious and ultra-Orthodox women’s groups from attending a conference she held on the “right to gender separation,” do not represent the diversity of voices in the religious and ultra-Orthodox communities and those who wish to protect their basic rights.

This article is reproduced in its entirety.