On the religionization of public space, as with the occupation, the leaders of the anti-government protests are out of step with many taking to the streets.
Protesters take down the partition between men and women during gender-segregated prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square, Tel Aviv, September 24, 2023.
Oren Ziv writes in
+972 September 29, 2023
The members of the previously little-known “Rosh Yehudi” organization may live in Tel Aviv, but it seems they were out of touch with the prevailing mood among their neighbors. They thought, perhaps, that most Tel Avivians would find it distasteful to stage a protest on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and that they would choose to respect Orthodox religious customs by allowing gender-segregated prayer in their city to go unhindered. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
It all began when Rosh Yehudi’s leaders asked the Tel Aviv Municipality for permission to hold a gender-segregated prayer service in Dizengoff Square on the eve of Yom Kippur. The Municipality has permitted gender-segregated prayer in public spaces since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic; this year, however, the Municipality decided to reinstate the prohibition on the physical separation of men and women in public spaces that was put in place in 2018.
The Municipality’s decision to prevent public prayer that uses a physical barrier (known in Hebrew as a mechitza) to separate between men and women was upheld by both the Tel Aviv District Court and the Supreme Court following appeals. As Yom Kippur began on Sunday evening, however, Rosh Yehudi — one of a network of “Garin Torani” groups in Israel, which aim to spread religious-Zionist values among the Jewish public — sought to circumvent the ban on a mechitza by setting up a makeshift partition out of bamboo sticks and Israeli flags.
Inspectors from the Municipality were present and elected not to interfere (the mayor later admitted that he asked them to avoid escalating the situation), before protesters arrived and took down the mechitza themselves. The organizers asked police officers to remove the protesters, but they refused. At that point, those participating in the prayer service — a few dozen people — relocated to a nearby synagogue. The police have since revoked Rosh Yehudi’s permission to hold public events for the upcoming festival of Sukkot.
What is clear from this episode is that the Israeli right — from the members of Rosh Yehudi to their leaders in the Knesset — have apparently failed to take heed of the changes taking place in Israeli society in general and Tel Aviv in particular. Amid the sustained public mobilization against the far-right government’s judicial coup, many Tel Avivians are simply fed up, and are no longer willing to accede to the right’s dictates. They refused to go along with the pretense that a public prayer service is innocent and apolitical, that a few flags separating men and women is not a form of gender segregation, or that Rosh Yehudi’s intention is anything less than to transform the state into a Jewish theocracy and import their methods of operation from the West Bank into the heart of Tel Aviv.
But those on the right are not the only ones who misjudged the mood of the public; the reactions of the protest movement’s leaders also show them to be out of step with their own camp — and not for the first time.
More …
