“I’m in Milwaukee to invite you to fight for the values you believe in in the Jewish state, because if you don’t fight for them, then you might wake up one morning and not recognize Israel. Israel is way too important to be left to Israelis.”
So said Israeli activist Anat Hoffman to an audience estimated at 150 at Congregation Beth Israel Ner Tamid on May 20.
Hoffman is executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center, the arm of the Reform movement that advocates for civil rights and religious pluralism in Israel.
She is also chair of Nashot HaKotel, or Women of the Wall, the group that has been demonstrating for “the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall,” according to the group’s website.
To illustrate some of her points, Hoffman put on her official red, white and purple Nashot HaKotel tallit during her presentation. Although American audiences might be familiar with the sight of a woman in a prayer shawl, it’s almost always a first for Israelis, she said.
“For all its brilliant technology (cell phones, cherry tomato, drip irrigation, more Nobel Prizes than China or India), Israel is Jewishly bankrupt,” Hoffman said.
“You get a ticket to Israel, and you think, ‘I’m going to the Club Med of the Jewish soul, the Disneyland of the Jews.’ And I’m telling you, you come from the Disneyland of the Jews. There’s more innovation here than we have in Israel,” Hoffman said.
“The reason is we don’t have the arguing that we’ve always had as Jews: with ourselves, each other, with God, with the prophets, with Moses. This is the core,” she continued. “Instead of what we’ve always done, we suddenly gave state funding and power to one faction.
“Orthodoxy is not corrupt innately; it’s an important minority, but it’s not good for Judaism or the Jewish state to give them a complete monopoly.”
Who decides?
Women of the Wall began in 1988 when about 100 women, including delegates to the First International Jewish Feminist Conference, some wearing tallitot and tefillin, met at the Western Wall to pray aloud and read from the Torah.
Hoffman said this is the only group in which Jews from all denominations pray together regularly or that wrote its own interdenominational siddur.
In traditional Judaism, only men have conducted such services at the Wall, which is a portion of the retaining wall built to support the Temple mount and completed during the first century C.E.
The Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the group of Orthodox religious leaders responsible for the site, argues that women who do so, contrary to “local custom,” violate the Holy Places Law of 1967 by desecrating the space and infringing on worshippers’ freedom of access.
Authorities have stipulated that women may only pray in subdued voices in the Kotel plaza without prayer attire and without reading from the Torah, or they must stay toward the back, or in a smaller, less accessible area, an archeological site known as Robinson’s Arch.
“Who decides what’s ‘local custom’? Who criminalized these activities that are done regularly in synagogues?” Hoffman said. “The wall is 60 meters long, 48 for men and 12 for women. On the men’s side, all religious activities are possible, but on women’s side, they’re criminal acts.
“We’re in the middle of a cultural war. How do we combine democracy with Jewish values?”
Enduring verbal and physical assaults and disruptions by haredi Orthodox counter-protestors, arrests, and tear gas, several of the women filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court to allow their services to continue.
With support from the International Committee for Women of the Wall, many Israelis (including members of the Knesset) and Jews around the world, but especially the United States, WOW has held Rosh Hodesh (new month) services at the Wall 11 times a year, despite opposition from traditionalists and police. Hofmann herself has been arrested repeatedly.
After months of highly publicized encounters and legal maneuvers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky to devise a solution.
This past January, IRAC presented a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court. The court upheld the women’s right to worship at the wall or wearing prayer attire and ruled that police could not arrest them.
On May 10, haredi Orthodox rabbis called for thousands of protesters, including young women bussed in from seminaries. Police arrested male protesters who attacked the women and attempted to disrupt the service.
Although the Kotel conflict has generated much publicity, Hoffman also has fought for pluralism on other fronts, including for the official recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis by the Israeli government.
“You meet Israeli politicians all the time,” Hoffman said. “You need to ask them, ‘What is it with Israel that you don’t recognize our rabbis?’ It’s not just an insult to your rabbis; it denies Israelis to know that there’s more than one way to be Jewish.”
“You can’t wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time,” Hoffman said. “So let’s not wring our hands; we’re in the rolling up the sleeves mode.”
Hoffman has also been active in overturning official policies that silence women on the radio, and is working to ban gender segregation on Israeli busses.
During the question period, an audience member asked about the Sharansky plan, which includes making the Robinson’s Arch area available for egalitarian prayer.
Hoffman expressed doubts about the plan’s feasibility, and said that both archeologists and Muslim groups oppose it. She offered a counter-proposal that involves scheduling traditional male-only prayer in shifts, leaving the Wall plaza open at other times.
Hoffman was born in Jerusalem. After her military service, she attended the University of California Los Angeles, earning a degree in psychology.
She served on Jerusalem’s city council for 14 years, where she fought to see that the powerful haredi bloc on the council did not dictate lifestyle choices for the largely secular population.
In a telephone conversation with the Chronicle on May 21, Hoffman said she was on a long-planned 18-day trip that also included stops in Kansas City, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York City and Washington, D.C.
Milwaukee was on her itinerary because she had met Rabbi Jacob Herber, spiritual leader of Beth Israel Ner Tamid, in Israel, and he has been “a solid supporter and friend,” she said. The public program on May 20 was a “last minute” addition to her plans, she said.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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