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More on Women at the Wall

On Yom Kippur Day the women of Kol Ami took pictures with Torah scrolls to be part of the Women of the Wall Campaign to flood Israeli leadership with women holding scrolls.   If you want to add your picture to the campaign visit the Women of the Wall website.  (or make a donation!)

Of course Anat Hoffman was arrested on Rosh Chodesh Elul for doing just that as she walked away from the wall.  And now this.  The article in Haaretz yesterday documenting the call for Anat’s prosecution.

But The article gets it wrong.  It calls the events this summer a near brawl. There was no brawl. Just peaceful men and women singing and carrying the Torah lovingly to read it. The only problem was the police who tried to wrestle the scroll from Anat’s arms.

The article says the police asked her not to carry the Torah. They did not. I was standing next to Anat for the entire service and then as she carried the Torah I was perhaps 5 paces behind her.  They didn’t ask at all. They hustled her, separated her from the group by surrounding her and grabbed at her and the Torah scroll to try to take it away. The only requests that ever came from the Jerusalem police that morning was to pray quietly and as the group was getting larger  to move back towards the back of the women’s section.

The Chief Rabbi of the wall ought to be ashamed of himself.  Rabinowitz is an affront to the title of rabbi.  Rabbi means teacher.  He is teaching hatred and disdain for Judaism and Torah rather than teaching about the Shekinah’s embrace.

Time for Israel’s political leadership to get some spiritual strength to stand up to these rabbinic buffoons like Rabinowitz that are so full of themselves there is no room for Jews who want to read Torah.  Sad.

2 thoughts on “More on Women at the Wall”

  1. you may call the chief rabbi a baffon and other names but that means you are no better than any other person who uses namecalling instead of a valid argument. you may be right that the israeli politicians should get involved, but you wont win your argument. reform jews and all other liberals dont seem to understand that other views could be as valid as theirs. not all jews agree with the reform movement. judaism was able to survive all these thousand of years due to the fact that our traditions were kept in tact, not changed to please the few.

    1. While you may disagree with liberal Jews–the fact remain that the Kotel belongs to ALL Jews. Further they had no right to arrest Anat Hoffman, she was walking AWAY from the Kotel with the Torah to read it in the spot the Israeli Supreme Court arranged. This is nothing short of grandstanding by Rabinowitz and the Chief Rabbinate. I call ’em like I see ’em. And the valid argument is that there was no legal violation at all. Judaism was able to survive all these years with innovation and creativity. Exactly what progressive Judaism is about. Orthodoxy as practiced by the chief rabbinate isn’t innovative it is narrow, patriarchal and harmful to Jewish life and expression. It isn’t protecting anything–it is strangling Judaism and Jews.

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