Women in the News.

Jerusalem is a Holy city for all the world’s three great monotheist religions and as Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all structured on the premise that women are second class citizens, it should come as no surprise that the lot of women in Jerusalem is not a happy one.

Largely Christianity is seen to have taken a bath, or at least a modesty bath in relation to women’s rights and largely when religion and women’s equality are mentioned in the same breath we tend to save our ire for Islam.

Not to be outdone however, ultra-religious Jewish leaders are now racking up the stakes when it comes to discrimination and segregation involving women so equality campaigners say as reported by Sky News today..

Long chastised as being the source of original sin for stealing apples, body-flaunting and other nefarious acts extremist Rabbis have decided women singing in public places is too sexual for men to hear.

‘The female voice is beautiful and it is fine for women to sing to each other but we do not want men exposed to the temptation,’ Yakov Halperin, a religious member of Jerusalem's City Council, said.

Women's rights groups have taken to singing in the street in protest.

‘We cannot let them silence us,’ one woman said as a crowd of about 100 women sang beside one of the city's main roads. ‘This is a slippery slope and it's our democracy that's at stake,’ another protester said.

Even Israel's military, long a bastion of sexual equality, has been drawn into the row with some religious soldiers boycotting ceremonial events where female soldiers might be singing.

This increasingly conservative attitude towards women reflects the steady demographic shift in Israel due to the growth of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community, particularly in Jerusalem.

Ultra-orthodox Jews - with their preference for large families - are the fastest expanding sector of society. Demographers now estimate about a third of last year's Jewish babies were born into the ultra-Orthodox community, an insular and devout minority that has long been at loggerheads with the rest of the increasingly modern and prosperous country.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews – known in Hebrew as ‘Haredim,’ or ‘those who tremble’ before God – have a birth rate far higher than that of other Israeli Jews, with 10 children in a single family not uncommon. They seem poised to become far more numerous and influential and why wouldn’t they many would ask? They are exempt from work and conscription and receive many benefits from the state.

Not satisfied with this they now want to impose their views on what is a largely progressive society.

‘The Haredim have set up a state within a state and have a long conflict with the state of Israel, which is now on the eve of an explosion,’ said Kobi Arieli, a popular radio host and author from the liberal edge of the Haredi community.

In shades of Alabama in the Sixties in Jerusalem women frequently sit at the back of buses, have separate entrances in some shops and different hours at medical facilities.
Although the practice is confined to ultra-observant neighbourhoods women's groups say it is part of the creeping marginalisation of half of the population.

‘It is now rare to find any images of women at all, even those dressed modestly,’ Idit Karni told Sky News. ‘I am a mother of daughters and I do not want them to grow up in a city where women are becoming invisible,’ Ms Karni said.


I must confess that when I was in Jerusalem recently I was saddened to see segregation at the famous Wailing or West Wall. With three quarers of the wall reserved for men and the women cramped up into a corner shielded from sight by a high fence. (this can be seen in the photo the women's section of the wall is nearest to the camera.)

Surely the time has come to say that any religion which wishes to hark back to its stone-age past by marginalising women, has had is day!