Women For the Wall condemned today the Women of the Wall’s demand that the government prevent traditional women from praying at the Kotel. In its list of sixteen conditions for moving their Rosh Hodesh prayer to a new section, the Women of the Wall requires that, effective immediately, the government stop “ultra-Orthodox leaders who are organizing demonstrations against Women of the Wall.” This is a reference to Women For the Wall, who have brought thousands of women to the Kotel each month to show their desire that the traditions of the Wall not be changed.
“The very idea that a group that can hardly muster 100 women on a good month should dictate to the government how to run the Kotel plaza is mindboggling,” said Ronit Peskin, Director of Women for the Wall. “The list of demands is yet another example of Women of the Wall’s preoccupation with themselves at the expense of the Jewish People.”
Women of the Wall’s demands include an anti-democratic ban on other organized groups, as well as a permanent cap on the size of the area for traditional prayer – along with the “right” to arrange for women to sing in the plaza immediately behind the men’s section without restriction. Additional demands include a contiguous plaza which would inevitably damage the existing archeological site, a state budget equivalent to the one currently available to the administration of the existing plaza, control over the development of the alternative plaza and the existing plaza (outside the separate prayer area), and a government commitment to augmenting the prestige of the new egalitarian plaza.
“While they claim to fight for ‘women’s rights’, the Women of the Wall are trampling the rights of all other women, demanding that they be removed from the Kotel women’s section when WOW shows up,” said Leah Aharoni, co-founder of Women for the Wall. “Women of the Wall claim to give women a voice at the Kotel, yet in reality they are there to squash the voice of hundreds of thousands of women, who oppose their antics and want to preserve existing Jewish tradition.”
Women for the Wall, a grassroots organization committed to preserving the consensus around the Kotel and maintaining the sanctity of the place, is dedicated to ensuring that the Western Wall can be a place for all Jews to come and pray with respect and dignity. It believes that only by preserving classical Jewish practice at the Wall can it be a place where all Jews can be welcome.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
11 Responses
The zionists feel that the kotel is a great historic site of their culture – similar to the role played by the Washington Monument or the Liberty Bill in American culture– and that it is a problem that all those nutty religious fanatics (as they refer to us frummies) are descecrating their national zionist shrine with obsolete and antiquated religious practices.
Seen from their perspective, the zionists are perfectly rational and consistent.
If these awful people want a wall, let them go to the other side – the one on the east side.
Give a finger, grab a hand
They may feel it is “historic” but it is more than that, it is “religious”. That has more value and importance.
The Women Off the Wall want to impose their brand of feministic Judaism on all. They are a miniscule number of nuts and should be ignored. Some of the Women Off the Wall board members have had a womens prayer service in Brooklyn for over 30 years and it has had no growth. Clearly these women are a tiny but vocal minority.
The ‘Women for the Wall’ should continue to protest according to their religious convictions and challenge the reform women according to democratic principles. We are the majority and the only real significance of the area is religious. By giving in to the ‘Women of the Wall’, the government is becoming dictatorial and fascist!
#1***** You still obsessed with Zionism??
You’re either a BT ( doesn’t make you a bad guy) or from a modern orthodox family but was radicalized and hynotized en route to more extreme Yiddishkeit.
Probably took some college courses or is a college graduate , etc.
Something about you isn’t right…Whatever.
Mr. Akuperma… I give up ! Please tell us what Israeli
bureaucratic mishap in your life caused you to hate them 24/7? You don’t seem happy— you just want to get even.
@akuperma – While I am very against the idea of labeling, because that is what tears apart the Jewish Nation, I do have to say one thing to you. The people that you refer to as “zionists” are mostly also against Women of the Wall. WOW is a group of Reform Jews that don’t care about anything including Halacha, whereas zionists DO care about Halacha, even if some hot-headed know-it-alls think that they know everything and that everyone else is a clueless person that knows nothing about religion
Women of the Wallnuts are mostly Reform or just plain nuts, but that’s an oxymoron.
These REFORMers just don’t get it!!
Sometime in the mid 1800’s some whackadoodles, Jews who were tired and/or ashamed of Judaism (today we call them self-hating Jews) decided to Reformulate the Jewish religion so that it would be more to their liking. First they did away with Jewish tradition. Then they threw out Halacha along with the Torah. Then some decided that you don’t have to believe in G-D. Then they made up their own religion of social “justice” based on their misinterpretation of “Tikun Olam” and they called their newly formulated religion “Reform Judaism”. Every year the self proclaimed leaders of this phony group get together at a ‘convention’ to decide what new laws will be enacted and what old laws will be tweaked so that it conforms to their way of doing business…….Oh, I mean religion.
Unfortunately, the Reform leaders – men, women and transvestites alike, who call themselves Rabbi’s, lie to their followers & congregants. They tell them that “G-d didn’t write the Torah; men & women wrote the Bible” & “Those stories from the Torah are fables” & “You don’t have to eat only kosher or observe Shabbos – Those are old laws.”
Reform is not Judaism.
I’m glad that some posters are finally seeing through the façade that is called “Akuperma”.