High Court to rule on public Tel Aviv Yom Kippur prayer amid fears of repeat clashes
On Wednesday morning, judges are set to weigh in on a controversial service that underscores deep rifts in Israeli society and saw violent confrontations when it was held last year
Mati Wagner is The Times of Israel's religions reporter.
The High Court of Justice is expected to decide Wednesday morning whether an Orthodox Jewish organization has the legal right to hold Yom Kippur services in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, complete with a physical barrier that separates male and female worshipers.
Whatever the High Court decides, there is concern that this Yom Kippur might feature a repeat of the infighting that characterized last year’s prayers in Tel Aviv.
Last Yom Kippur, Dizengoff Square was the scene of a violent struggle between secular activists and a group of worshipers who had held the final Yom Kippur prayers there annually since 2020.
While the Tel Aviv municipality had previously stipulated that the prayer service could only be held if organizers refrained from erecting a mechitzah — or ritual barrier separating women and men — citing a 2018 bylaw against gender segregation in public spaces, the supplicants came prepared with a makeshift curtain comprised of Israeli flags on a bamboo frame. Police had approved the mechitzah in this form, as it didn’t impede movement between the two sides, but secular activists opposed to what they saw as Orthodox proselytizing attempted to tear it down anyway.
The infighting shocked the nation.
Israel Zeira, head of Rosh Yehudi, the Orthodox Jewish outreach movement based in Tel Aviv that petitioned the High Court to allow gender-segregated prayers, said that if his organization loses on Wednesday he will “either pray in synagogue or weigh his options.”
He declined to say what those options might be.
Noah Efron, a member of the Tel Aviv city council, voiced concern in a blog post for The Times of Israel Tuesday that if the High Court rules in favor of Rosh Yehudi, some Tel Aviv activists might attempt to disrupt the prayers.
A municipality prohibition against prayers — including non-segregated prayers — was knocked down by a Tel Aviv district court in September. The court argued that the right to pray in public is fundamental and anchored in Israeli law.
However, the court ruled that gender segregation in a public space — even in a situation in which those who did not want segregation could choose mixed prayer — was considered discriminatory.
“We have made it clear on every occasion that the municipality prohibits any gender separation in the public sphere, a resource for all citizens,” said the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality ahead of the slated High Court ruling. “This policy is applied in an egalitarian way to all religions — Muslim and Jewish alike. As a result, requests to conduct ceremonies that include gender segregation are rejected.”
Avrham Poraz, a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council for the Secular Green party, said, “This whole story has nothing to do with prayer; it is an act of defiance, an attempt to forcibly occupy Tel Aviv’s public space.”
“There are hundreds of synagogues in Tel Aviv where you can have gender separation,” added Poraz, a former Knesset member and internal affairs minister for the Shinui party which ran in 2003 on a staunchly liberal, secular platform. “Public spaces are not the place to pray. Muslims pray in mosques, Christians pray in churches and Jews pray in synagogues.”
Rosh Yehudi and the Tel Aviv Municipality both petitioned the High Court to rule on the legality of preventing prayers as well as gender segregation in Tel Aviv’s public spaces.
“There are people who want Judaism to be put in the closet,” said Zeira. “But there is a thirst for Judaism in Tel Aviv, we are answering a real need that people have to pray outside, especially for Kol Nidre and Ne’ila [the opening and closing prayers of the fast day].”
“When we first held Yom Kippur prayers, we prepared 200 chairs and 700 people showed up,” Zeira said. “The next year we prepared 700 chairs and 2,000 showed up. Two years ago we had 2,500. There was electricity in the air, a sense of unity, of fun, a positive atmosphere.”
Last Yom Kippur’s heated clashes shocked the nation and marked one of the low points and the final chapter of nine months of mass demonstrations against the government’s proposed judicial overhaul — some of them marred by violence — threats of insubordination in the IDF ranks and polarized political debate.
The unrest and dissent were centered on the judicial changes but also touched on deep cultural divides within Israeli society between liberal and conservative-minded Israelis.
Yom Kippur fell last year on September 25. Twelve days later, on October 7, all the divisiveness and civil unrest were temporarily eclipsed by Hamas’s deadly terror onslaught and the ensuing war in Gaza. The massacre saw 1,200 men, women and children brutally murdered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip in the bloodiest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
But this Yom Kippur, which begins sundown Friday, tensions among dissenting camps within Israeli society might be reignited over attempts to hold public prayers on Dizengoff Square.
“The religious Zionists who were for many years the partners of Ben Gurion are today in another place altogether,” said Poraz.
“Men never used to walk around with tzitzit [fringes] hanging outside. Women did not have those large head coverings that look like towers on their heads. These people are trying to change the status quo. They are missionaries who want the entire state to be like them. We won’t let them do it,” he said.
Zeira argued that Rosh Yehudi has no intention of coercing anyone.
“We at Rosh Yehudi are against religious coercion,” he said. “We are an organization that is involved with bringing Jews closer to their roots and anybody who does this work knows you cannot coerce anybody to do anything, not your own children, not your neighbors and clearly not secular Jews who are complete strangers.”
“Anybody who chooses to embrace a religious lifestyle takes upon himself a tremendous amount of change and nobody does it out of coercion, only out of awareness and consciousness,” said Zeira. “That is what characterizes this generation of Jews.”
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