By Amy Powell
The day Israeli police arrested Lesley Sachs, executive director of Women of the Wall, for bringing a Torah to the Western Wall to celebrate the new month of Sivan, her colleague, Anat Hoffman, chair of WOW and executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) stopped at HBI for a wide-ranging conversation.
Though the news, on that June 8, might have dampened Hoffman's spirits, it seemed to do just the opposite. The tireless warrior, who has devoted 27 years of effort on behalf of women's rights to pray at the Kotel with Torah, tallit and tefillin, seemed almost gleeful.
"Do you know how this helps — to have a woman led off for praying?" she asked.
To Hoffman, who has drawn criticism from some of the WOW’s founders for compromising and negotiating with the Israeli government, everything is a step in a battle for equality. Taking a long view, she noted that setbacks are part of the process. Each time a woman is arrested for peacefully reading from the Torah "the whole system is rocked," Hoffman said.
She pointed to the big picture — that incidents of gender segregation in the public sphere are down in Israel. Each year IRAC publishes a pamphlet titled, "Excluded, For God's Sake: Gender Segregation and the Exclusion of Women in the Public Sphere in Israel," but this year incidents were down so much they decided to publish every other year. For example, IRAC's lawsuit against a radio station which refused to broadcast women’s voices has led to women’s inclusion in their programming. In addition, forced segregated seating on public buses has ended due to a series of successful lawsuits against bus drivers reminding them of their duty not to be complicit in discrimination.
There are no plans to stop. IRAC is taking on El Al and discrimination in the air. Nearly anyone who has ever been on a recent El Al flight knows that they are often asked to move while ultra-Orthodox men negotiate to change seats so they don't have to sit next to women. IRAC is now supporting Renee Rabinowitz, the 81-year-old woman who fled Nazis as a child, and is suing El Al because she was asked to move on a Dec. 2, 2015, flight to accommodate the demands of an ultra-Orthodox Jew who objected to sitting next to a woman. IRAC claims that El Al has received more than 7,500 emails objecting to discrimination.
Hoffman said IRAC had been looking for a good case because so many women have been humiliated on El Al and she’s looking forward to winning the case as well as seeing what comes out in the discovery phase. Her goal is that all seat assignments take place before the plane boards, eliminating the face to face acts of discrimination on the plane and tarmac which people feel pressured to accommodate.
At the Kotel, she described her plan two months ago to recite the Birkat Cohanim, the priestly blessing. The action was blocked, allegedly, for security reasons.
"We capitulated and hundreds came instead to protest our inability to say the Birkat Cohanim," but they succeeded in doing it the next month at Rosh Chodesh Iyar. "Those who did it found it very moving," and those who ridicule us, "dig themselves deeper."
To Hoffman, it is another example of a long-term strategy that often experiences setbacks. One of the painful parts of the fight is the rift between some of the founding members of WOW who parted with the group over compromises with the Israeli government, she said. The original group did not want to compromise for a women’s only section, but in the end WOW did compromise.
"It does feel like the back of the bus, but we can wear tallit, read Torah and wear phylacteries," said Hoffman. "I was willing to compromise because what we wanted, we tried for 27 years to get, and the country is not ready."
The South Plaza will be an egalitarian area and it will be gorgeous, she noted. Hoffman said the Israeli government has allocated $30 million and retained architect Michael Arad, best known for being the designer of the World Trade Center Memorial.
"I don't like compromise either but we have huge historic achievements," and she sees each of them as a step in the right direction. She sees compromise as a tool in working with the government. It doesn't have to be permanent. With a gleam in her eye she said, "If we win this, we can win the next one. "
Amy Powell is HBI’s communications director.
For a deeper understanding of the struggle for equality at the Kotel, see Pnina Lahav's chapter "The Woes of WOW: The Women of the Wall as a Religious Social Movement and as a Metaphor" in "Women's Rights and Religious Law," a new publication edited by HBI Associate Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe and Professor Fareda Banda of SOAS University of London, published by Routledge press.