By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Should Israel be a place that welcomes all Jews regardless of belief, or should it be a place where one religious viewpoint is sponsored by the government while the rest are merely accommodated? What defines a Jewish state is an issue Anat Hoffman deals with every day.
“The big question is, what are the values of that Jewish state? Who defines what is Judaism? Who holds the keys to Judaism? What kind of Judaism does the Jewish state have? A closed-minded one? A violent one? An extremist and fundamentalist one? Or one that has pluralism, tolerance, social justice at its core?” she said.
Though Hoffman is director of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Israel Religious Action Center, she is much better known these days as the leader of Women of the Wall, a group of mostly Orthodox women who wish “to pray out loud, read Torah, and wear a prayer shawl, a tallit,” according to Hoffman.
Israel’s religious authority currently proscribes them from doing so at the Kotel.
“[The Kotel] can’t be an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. Judaism should not be dictated by one faction only,” she said.
Hoffman, who served on Jerusalem’s City Council for 14 years, was summoned for questioning and fingerprinted by Israeli authorities in January, following the arrest in November of medical student Nofrat Frenkel for wearing a tallit during Women of the Wall’s monthly prayer service at the Kotel, as the western wall of the second temple in Jerusalem is called.
Spurred in the winter of 1988 by a group of North American women, who wished to hold Torah services in the women’s area of the Kotel but were assaulted after doing so, Hoffman has been bringing women to pray at the beginning of each month since.
Hoffman visited Temple Beth Am in Seattle as the synagogue’s scholar-in-residence during the weekend of Feb. 19–21. Her visit came partly as a result of the urging of Beth Am member Goldie Silverman, who, during a temple-led trip to Israel two years ago, heard Hoffman speak and was entranced by what she had to say.
Silverman said she has been upset about the fracas surrounding Frenkel’s arrest and the prohibition on women holding prayer services at the Wall, particularly after her own experience there during that trip.
“When all of us were together at the wall, why didn’t we have a service? That would have been the most appropriate place. Here we were, a group from the synagogue, there with our rabbi,” Silverman said. “We were made to feel unwelcome.”
Rules on who can and cannot worship at the wall have become ever more strict during the past several years, Hoffman said. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the women must hold their services, which follow halachah, or Jewish law, at the nearby Robinson’s Arch.
“The Court believed it had to reach a compromise between proponents of traditional and egalitarian prayer which would enable the Kotel to remain the fundamental symbol which unites the Jewish people, rather than a site of contention which divides them,” Akiva Tor, Israel’s consul general to the Pacific Northwest, told JTNews via e-mail.
Hoffman met with Tor in San Francisco the day before she came to Seattle. She said she rejects the court’s suggestion that the locations are equal.
“It’s an archaeological site. It doesn’t have siddurim, it doesn’t have chairs, they don’t let you sit down, they don’t let you stay away from the rain when it rains, and worst of all, at 9:15 they charge you 30 shekels to go in,” Hoffman said.
But Hoffman also brought up a larger question: “If a halachic group doesn’t have a place at the wall, what do non-halachic groups do?” Hoffman said. “This particular group, at this particular hour, with this particular mode, is the least of all provocation: Orthodox consensus, omitting anything that could be b’kedusha, that requires a minyan, all modestly dressed, at the most ungodly hours at 7 in the morning, spacing themselves as far from the wall and as far from the men and as far from the partition, and as far from anybody who might be disturbed as possible.”
Yet there is resistance, even from other women at the Kotel who say they are offended by these women who want to read from the Torah. Police this month had to hold back protestors from attacking the group, though the worshippers were subjected to verbal attacks.
Still, the women are showing up.
“At Rosh Chodesh Adar we had 200 women,” Hoffman said, referring to the Hebrew month that began last week. “We have not been 200 in the winter ever. Ever. We barely have a minyan in winter. We had 153 at Tevet [two months ago].”
It appears the arrest has created a groundswell of support for the women — both the Reform and Conservative movements in the U.S. have taken up the cause.
“The wall belongs to the entire Jewish people; it must not be used as a tool of division,” wrote URJ president Rabbi Eric Yoffie in a statement following Frenkel’s arrest. “We urge the government to enforce the law at the Kotel in an equal and just manner and to end harassment of women gathering there for prayer.”
In a letter sent by Richard Skolnik, president, and Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, to Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren and the ambassador to Canada, Miriam Ziv, they stated: “We urge the municipality of Jerusalem, the State of Israel and its ambassador to the United States to realize the gravity of this issue and take immediate steps to promote religious pluralism, provide equitable treatment to non-Orthodox streams of Jewish life and end the harassment of women seeking to pray with dignity at the Western Wall, Judaism’s most holy place.”
The letter requested that supporters of the women let Oren and consuls general worldwide know their feelings — and they have.
“From the protest letters I received, I had the feeling that some of the signatories were imagining Israel in far darker colors than it deserves,” said Consul General Tor. “Israel is a place of exceptional human freedom and of great Jewish religious creativity by women, and this ought not be overlooked — even if one is angered by the Kotel issue.”
Oren, speaking at a conference of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs on Tuesday, responded as well.
“I will only assure you that I think there are good solutions for the problems at the Kotel,” he said. “They are at the top of my agenda. And that at the end of the day, it will require compromise on everyone’s behalf.”
Hoffman said she doubts that prosecutors will pursue a case against her of “performing a religious act that offends the feeling of others,” which could result in a $3,000 fine or six-month prison term.
“I think it’s insanity if they decide to pursue it, but hopefully its going to make things happen here,” Hoffman said. “That’s my hope.”