Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on October 22, 2012

By Ben Sales and Neil Rubin October 22, 2012

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TEL AVIV (JTA) -- Last weeks episode was hardly the first time Israeli police stopped activist Anat Hoffman while she was leading a womens prayer service at the Western Wall in violation of Israeli law.

But this time, police actually arrested Hoffman -- a first, she says -- and the incident appears to be galvanizing liberal Jewish groups in the United States and Israel.

In the United States, the Union for Reform Judaism called for a police investigation and expressed its dismay to Michael Oren, Israels ambassador in Washington. The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism announced a global Shema flash mob for Monday -- a nod to the prayer Hoffman was reciting when she was arrested.

In Israel, the Israel Religious Action Center, which Hoffman leads, launched a petition to the Supreme Court requesting that the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which runs the holy site also known as the Kotel, change its decision-making process to include non-Orthodox Jews.

There is no voice around that table for women, for the paratroopers who liberated the Wall, for the variety of pluralist voices, Hoffman, who is also chairwoman of Women of the Wall, told JTA. We want to dismantle this body. If the Wall belongs to the Jewish people, where are the Reform, Conservative, secular?

For now, however, there is no grand coordinated strategy to challenge the laws governing Israels holy site, which bar women from praying while wearing a tallit prayer shawl or tefillin, or from reading aloud from the Torah. In a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court decision, those rules were upheld on the ground that local custom at the Wall did not allow for such practices.

So with Women of the Wall intent on continuing its practice of organizing a womens prayer service at the site every Rosh Chodesh -- the beginning of the Hebrew month -- another incident likely is not far off.

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Anat Hoffman’s arrest at Western Wall galvanizing liberal Jewish groups

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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