Bnei Brak rabbis ask locals to ignore planned women’s rights march through city
The rally is meant to protest discrimination against women, as well as exemption for Haredim from military service
Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
Leading rabbis from Bnei Brak have called on residents not to interact with participants of a women’s rights protest march planned to take place in the predominantly Haredi city on Thursday evening.
“Do not end up in a confrontation with [protesters] in any way, shape, or form,” Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Landa, an influential rabbi, said in a statement cosigned by several other local rabbis Thursday, ahead of the march. “Do not react to them, for better or worse, and do not end up around them. Certainly do not argue with them lest you desecrate God,” the text reads.
The march, which is planned to start in nearby Ramat Gan and end with speeches in Bnei Brak on Thursday night, comes in response to reports in the media in recent weeks on multiple incidents involving girls and women who said they’d been coerced, intimidated, ignored or denied service in connection with their sex aboard public transportation or in other public circumstances.
In a flyer advertising the event, its organizers from several women’s rights groups wrote: “We say to the leadership of the Haredi public and the whole government: We’ve had enough.
“We will no longer allow religious coercion, the exclusion of women and inequality in fulfilling one’s duties,” they said, referencing the exemption enjoyed by most Haredi yeshiva students from army service. “We will not allow you, as part of the [judicial] coup, to turn Israel into a religious dictatorship like Turkey.”
The government’s judicial shakeup seeks to curtail the judiciary, which critics say has taken away too much power from elected officials. Opponents of the judicial overhaul say it compromises democratic principles because it removes essential checks and balances on the executive branch. Advocates of the plan say it restores democracy by returning powers taken over by the court to elected officials.
The government’s critics say it is jeopardizing women’s rights with a host of developments, including bills allowing sex segregation in some public settings and giving more powers to rabbinical courts, where many believe women are at a disadvantage because of Jewish Orthodox law favoring men in judicial processes.
Thursday night is a busy time in Bnei Brak, when many young men go out to dinner at the many eateries scattered around the city’s center. Police did not approve the request by march organizers to hold the event through the center of town. Instead, the approved route (Hebrew link) runs from Ramat Gan’s stadium to the Rabbi Akiva Junction in Bnei Brak’s northwestern tip.
Several prominent individuals have criticized the decision to hold the rally in Bnei Brak.
Tamar Ish-Shalom, a secular news presenter for Channel 13, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that she shares the impression that women are being excluded and harassed by some Haredim and that community leaders are largely silent on this issue. But “demonstrating against a whole section of the population, a whole city, men, women, and children, is not the way. It’s wrong on a moral level and may not serve the struggle, which is more important now than ever.” She called the planned march “wrong and unnecessary.”
Others defended the march. Tomer Persico, a lecturer at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem and the Department for Comparative Religion of Tel Aviv University, said it was “necessary to demonstrate in Haredi cities, if this is done respectfully.”
He wrote on X that “the Haredi population needs to understand that its representatives have started a fight with the liberal public in Israel and that this public will not take it lying down: It will come at a price.”
An ostensible attempt at dialog with Haredim by male and female activists against the overhaul ended discordantly last week aboard a bus en route to Bnei Brak from Ashdod. The protesters boarded the bus, where sex segregation is practiced because the line services mostly Haredi passengers, to speak with the passengers. An argument broke out and the encounter devolved into an angry singing match.
Anti-overhaul protesters have staged rallies in Bnei Brak, including in its center, at least twice since the inauguration of the current government, which relies on a coalition between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and five religious parties. Both times, the rallies ended without major incident, and protesters were greeted with treats, bottles of water, and smiles as part of a grassroots charm offensive by locals.
The Times of Israel Community.