Anti-overhaul protesters rally for women’s rights outside religious courts

Anti-government protesters rallied outside several rabbinical courts Tuesday amid the “Day of Disruption” demonstrations against the government’s judicial overhaul plans.

At the demonstrations outside rabbinical courts in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ashdod, demonstrators came out against what they termed an attempt to compromise women’s rights through legislation advanced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline coalition.

At least one person, a woman, was detained outside the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court on suspicion of vandalism.

The action targeting rabbinical courts, which seems to have been coordinated by the Building an Alternative group of feminist activists, coincided with a massive wave of protests in plazas and roads and at train stations across the country throughout the day that resulted in multiple arrests.

The female protester who was detained outside the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court was filmed spraypainting “shame” on the building’s wall.

On its Facebook page, Building an Alternative said protests outside rabbinical courts were a response to “the commencement of the expansion of the authorities” of those courts. This was a reference to a bill submitted by Religious Services Minister Michael Malkieli this week that aims to give rabbinical courts discretion over child support, overriding a 2019 Supreme Court ruling.

https://twitter.com/Israel1Il/status/1681257486165082113

Opponents say it is an attempt to compromise women’s rights, which they said would be jeopardized in the rabbinical court because halacha, Jewish law, favors men.

Police worked to prevent the protesters from entering the buildings.

In a statement, Eli Ben-Dahan, the director of the Rabbinical Courts, protested what he termed an attempt to politicize them.

“The rabbinical courts establishment has nothing to do with the judicial reform,” he wrote. He disputed that the bill constitutes an expansion of the courts’ powers, noting that they have ruled on child support for decades. “The rabbinical courts favor women in child support because it’s the duty of the man according to halacha,” he said. Secular family courts, which also have jurisdiction over child support, rule according to the spouse’s income level, he noted.

The protest outside the Tel Aviv court featured “attempts to disrupt deliberations and vandalism,” Ben-Dahan’s office wrote in a separate statement condemning those actions.

A spokesperson for Building an Alternative told Ynet: “The director of the rabbinical courts and his friends felt for the first time this morning what it’s like to be a woman in Israel who needs to visit the Rabbinate: weakened, helpless, lacking agency and discriminated against.”

Critics of Netanyahu’s government have decried what they view as its failure to uphold women’s rights on several fronts.

The coalition last week advanced a bill to restructure the official national authority for advancing gender equality. The move, critics say, will deprive the authority of professional independence and subject it to the whims of politicians.

Meanwhile, a new civil service directive has scrapped the practice of using masculine-feminine suffixes when publishing job tenders and ordered that they use only the masculine form. Hebrew nouns are gendered and when addressing mixed-gender groups, usage traditionally defaults to the masculine form. To boost gender equality, many have taken to including both the masculine and feminine form, using a slash mark to include both.

Also, the coalition deal between Religious Zionism and Likud included an agreement that Israel will not sign onto the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty intended to battle violence against women.

The ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition, furthermore, do not permit women to stand as lawmakers.