Women Against the Wall
I find it extremely ironic that a group of women run by Reform Jews, funded by NIF (the New Israel Fund), and promoting hatred toward Orthodox women is called “Women of the Wall”.
For decades, while Jews were denied access to the Western Wall, the one unifying factor among the Jews of Jerusalem was that they all, secular and religious, yearned to see the return of the Kotel to Jewish hands. In fact, the biggest a honor a Jew could have during the Mandate was to be the official (arrested) Shofar blower after Yom Kippur. The man was afforded much accolade by the other Jewish prisoners when he got to the Russian compound.
My brief “ love affair” with the Reform movement lasted from my sophomore year in high school until I was 19 years old...roughly 4 years. Because my parents were intermarried, my mother Jewish and my father a former Presbyterian, I grew up mostly without any real religious background. We celebrated the major holidays of both religions, and that was that. We never went to church or synagogue for any of these, just to family and friends. I grew up with watered-down celebrations of Chanukah, Christmas, Passover and Easter. As I grew up in a small suburb outside of Philadelphia without any other Jewish children to play with, I was often the recipient of anti-Semitic jibes from schoolmates, as well as actual violence. Then, there were those who would pretend to be friendly in order to try to convert me to Christianity.
When I got to 10th grade I decided that I wanted to know more about Judaism, and started going to confirmation class at a Reform synagogue about a 30 minute drive from our home. As I got older and more involved in my youth group and later won a scholarship contest for a trip to Israel, I yearned for a more traditional view of Judaism. My opportunity came when I was about to start my freshman year in college at a small, popular liberal arts college that dropped its Hebrew minor. I decided then and there that I wanted to be in Israel, and I came back to attend the 4 year program at Hebrew University, with intense Hebrew study.
During my time at the Hebrew University I was exposed to a myriad of Jewish lifestyles, from the very traditional families who often hosted Hebrew University students for Shabbat meals, to the staunchly secular who bought and stocked pita in their freezer for Pesach. (It’s illegal for Jewish businesses to sell bread to Jews on Passover.) Then, I was hit with one of the most difficult periods of my life, when I decided I wanted to become a new immigrant to Israel and had to fight it out with the Rabbinate to get papers certifying I was Jewish.
For me, this became a period of deep emotional pain. My mother had always told me growing up that I was Jewish because she is; now someone was telling me I wasn’t because my father isn’t. I had always been told that Judaism is passed through our mother. So, I didn’t see what relevance my father’s history had on my identity, other than pure discrimination. Ironically, while I was fighting to get my Jewish ID papers in 1990, thousands of Russian immigrants were being granted citizenship based on patrilineal Jewish descent. So, frankly, I really resented the Ministry of the Interior.
The Reform movement, of course, couldn’t do a thing to help me with this fight, since they for the most part were the cause of the fight. Finally, just before Purim, I managed to get a paper from the Rabbinate certifying I was Jewish, and a couple months later I also received letters from the Orthodox rabbis of relatives.
Back to my experiences with Reform Judaism: In 1989 I came to Israel with NFTY and participated in the Inside Israel program, a four month long program that included living with Israeli families in Jerusalem, studying at Hebrew Union College, and then a period of volunteer work on Kibbutz.
During our studies at HUC I was exposed to Women of the Wall, who made their debut at the Kotel to the sound of cracking chairs and the sting of tear gas. It was literally a melee. I attended a meeting about the group at which women argued for and against the group, and I attended a Rosh Chodesh event later that summer, that was less fraught with violence but still scary.
Then, during the course of my year at Hebrew University I had more and more exposure to traditional Judaism, which struck a strong inner cord in me, and drew me in. I remember Reform leaders quipping some line about my being brainwashed, which I always found funny since if anyone brainwashed me, it had been the Reform movement; and, my move to more traditional Judaism actually set me free. It set me free to discover what being Jewish and living in Israel is really about. For me, being Jewish and living in Israel became inseparable from the Torah.
Several factors together caused me to flee from the Reform Movement. For one, as a member of the Reform movement, one is always fighting with the authorities – fighting for Arab rights in spite of Jewish rights, fighting for women’s rights in spite of men, fighting, fighting. No being calm and just enjoying life.
Another factor was that the Reform Movement denies Jewish rights to most of our ancestral home land, including Hebron and the Temple Mount. This was a large factor for me, since as a participant in a NFTY program I had been denied a trip to Gush Etzion to meet Yuli Kasharovsky and his family when they made Aliyah in March 1989. While I was in high school, I campaigned hard for their release, writing letters and petitions, and to be denied an opportunity to meet them because of where they lived, no less by a group of people who call themselves “open-minded,” deeply disappointed me.
Finally, I also could not cope with the Reform Jewish refrain that our people is no more special than anyone else and Judaism is no more special than any other religion. In Reform Jewish Liturgy, the Aleynu prayer is changed, leaving out the part spurning idol worship. As a friend pointed out at HUC when we had a class on this matter, that it made no sense to do this, as there’s no reason to choose a philosophy or religion that denies it is more unique or special than another. It’s simply illogical. Over the years I have come to realize that this alone is probably the major factor in the millions of American Jews who turn their backs on Judaism. Their own movement tells them to do so, because it’s no more special than any other religion. With that I agree: Reform Judaism is not special at all.
Every month, on Rosh Chodesh, I am faced with the Kotel dilemma, forced to choose sides, and reminded of the mantra a close male friend of mine brought up when I was 17 and considering attending Stern College. He said “Separate but equal is not always equal”. Yes, I agree. But, also, women and men are very much unequal: our differences are biological, physiological, psychological and educational. We are very much unequal, and no amount of argument, rhetoric or other mental exercises is going to change this fact.
WOW leaders love to make Orthodox women appear as if we stepped out of the stone-age into modernity. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, true, when I left the Reform movement I started shaving my legs and armpits again. But, also, I realized a new aspect of Feminism which is typically European feminism and focuses on the family unit and its needs to cope in society, as opposed to American feminism whose illness derives from focusing solely on the woman and her war against society. Anyone familiar with serious feminist literature knows that feminism is actually a branch of communism. Popular feminist writers such as Shulamit Firestone propose confiscating children from their parents to raise them in communes.
For the most part, Israeli Feminism was very much of the European brand until groups like NIF and the Reform movement started pouring billions of dollars of influence into Israeli female minds, to the detriment of us all. This new age of Israeli feminism has not only brought warfare to the Kotel, but has also been accompanied by a much more detrimental and horrendous side-effect. Israel is now number one in the world for removing children from their homes; from their loving, dedicated, and sometimes foiling parents, to the desolation of foster-care, group homes, and psychiatric facilities.
Instead of supporting single mothers, however, the Israeli feminists rob us of dignity and honor, and motherhood. Whenever a single mother is attacked, there’s no bleeding-heart Israeli feminist around to help her with the legal battle, or stage protests or call press conferences. Feminist organizations ignore the single mothers’ plight.
So, every month when the new calls come out to join a group at the Wall, the Kotel Maaravi, my chest heaves, and tears flow from my eyes. WOW does not understand that aside from public desecration of peace and unity among Jews, they represent everything that is wrong with feminism in Israel: the removal of women from the home to the workplace, the removal of children from their loving homes to the homes of abusive and negligent strangers, and the ultimate true rape of women: closed courts and committees ignoring the rule of law and stripping mothers of our G-d given rights to raise our own children in dignity.
One might question my logic of comparing women donning tefillin and tallit at the Kotel to the extremism of the social welfare network, but they are connected. Their funders, the New Israel Fund, support both the media efforts of Women of the Wall, and foster homes. (They also give cameras to Arabs to film “evil” settlers in Hebron.)
So, WOW, is your fight really to protect Jewish women, or is it to make us like men: barren, ignorant of our bosoms, working 9 to 5, and ignoring our God given talents in order to pretend to be something else, separate, and less than what we really are, but with "wonderful" and full, “equal” prayer rights in the synagogue; because the illusion of equality is all that matters, right?
And how, I ask, for heaven’s sake, have Jewish women -the descendants of Sarah and Chanah, who cried and prayed for children - been deluded enough to see such a petty fight blown out of all rational proportion, as a good thing?
