Elana Sztokman

Although the notion of “separate but equal” was formally dismissed in the United States back in the 1950s under the understanding that separate is not equal, the concept still retains a fiercely resistant presence in certain sectors of Israeli society. I am referring not to racial but rather to gender segregation, particularly in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox segments of society, much of which has spilled over into public spaces as well.

Over the past few months, Israeli society has witnessed a whole series of newly constructed practices for what are undoubtedly extreme views of the need for gender segregation:
• Separate sides of the street designated for a Sukkot holiday public festival in Jerusalem.
• The corpse of a woman removed from its burial place because it was next to a man in Tiberias
• Separate cashiers at the supermarket for men and women in Ramot.
• Separate public buses for men and women in Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, and more
• Separate El Al airline flights for men and women
• Separate offices for men and women in Modi’in Illit (some companies will not hire women in a company where men work)
• Separate exit times from synagogue in Safed (women were locked inside until all the men left)
• Banning of women from cemeteries in places including Elyachin, and silencing of women’s cries of mourning.
• The removal of all pictures of women from public advertisements – even women politicians, like Kadima head and former prime ministerial candidate MK Tzipi Livni
• The Photoshopped “erasure” of women cabinet members from Orthodox newspaper photos
• The covering up of dancers during a bridge opening ceremony in Jerusalem.
• Soldiers walking out of an army convocation ceremony because women were singing.
• Separate sections in the pharmacy for men and women in Bnei Brak.

This is all in addition to what have been “standard” practices for years in Orthodox communities all over the country: separate schools, separate preschools, separate colleges, separate sections in synagogue, separate dancing and eating areas at weddings and other affairs (in some communities, men and women are in separate buildings), and of course separate beaches and swimming times (actually, in Modi’in Illit, only boys are allowed to go swimming).

These practices are often justified on grounds of maintaining sexual “propriety,” but I submit that there is more at stake here. These are not expressions of sexual abstinence but of the removal of the female from the public sphere, and from the “male” world. It is about men creating a space free of all women and girls, as if women and girls are contaminated, dirty, evil, sinful, and threatening to “society” – read, men.

Indeed, one of the troubling differences in recent activity is the extension to the public sphere – including buses, supermarkets, streets, cemeteries, public army ceremonies, and of course airplanes. The idea that a bus or plane can be “hijacked” by the distorted gender ideas of religious extremists is a deeply disturbing eventuality, one that signals the desire on the part of the religious fringe to control all spaces in Israel. This is the Jewish version of the Taliban.

I had the misfortune one night of boarding a bus near Bnai Brak in which women were relegated to the back. As I walked down the aisle with a sleeping toddler on my shoulder, and men in black coats and big, black velvet skullcaps or black hats stared at me, one man began to get up for me but the man sitting next to him pulled his arm and gestured, “No, don’t.” The men sat back down, embarrassed, sheepish, or perhaps docile in obedience. Either way, the sound of compassion, equality, social justice, and morality, was publicly and definitively silenced.

The trend towards greater gender separation is not only getting more extreme, but is also increasing in violence. Elhanan Buzaglo, 29, of the self-described “Modesty Patrol” was recently sentenced to four years in prison for attacking a haredi woman nine months ago in her apartment in Jerusalem’s Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood. According to the indictment, Buzaglo and three other men brutally beat the divorced woman and questioned her about her relationships with men and told her that if she did not leave the apartment, that assault “was just the beginning.”

Devotees of this “modesty patrol”, under the leadership of “rabbi” Yitzhak Meir Shafranovich, attacked a woman for sitting next to a soldier on a bus, spilled acid on a teenage girl in Beitar Illit for wearing pants, flipped over a police car in Jerusalem, burned an MP4 player store, and spearheaded widespread violent protest during the weeks preceding the gay pride festival in Jerusalem, as if “gay” is the male expression of “sexually improper woman.”

This legitimization of violence against women who are perceived to be in violation of sexual norms follows a moral logic almost identical to those of honor killings in the Arab world. According to the reasoning underlying this behavior, a woman’s body is a form of public property – seen, viewed and observed by men on the street whose needs vis a vis this body must be fully adhered to. Women, whose spirit and person is completely absent from this reasoning, are perhaps responsible from protecting (male) members of the public from the sinfulness of seeing these bodies improperly displayed or presented – that is, until their failure to properly care for this “public property” revokes their responsibility for this task. Thus, when a body is seen as improper in dress or behavior, the body becomes property of the “community”, which is then charged with “correcting” the violation using any means necessary and available. Beating up another human being may against the Torah as well as the Western moral code, but it is deemed legitimate in this correction of female bodily incorrectness. Since the modesty patrol sees itself as free of already absolved itself from Jewish law in the face of a perceived non-normative female body, it is only a moral hop, skip, and jump away from the taking of a life. Given recent events and their surrounding rhetoric, such a possibility is no doubt on the horizon.

Perhaps most disconcerting is the support some of these behaviors receive from an unlikely source: secular, liberal Israelis. “This is their culture,” some have argued. “The Orthodox have the right not to have their cultural practices infringed upon.” This argument was heard most vociferously around the gay march riots. “You can’t blame the Orthodox,” an acquaintance of mine argued, to my horror. “The gays are offensive to their entire way of life.” The invocation of cultural relativism to support dictates that are culturally absolute is a terrible distortion of notions of freedom and liberty. The gays – or women, or non-Orthodox citizens – are not infringing on anyone, but merely living their life. The ones who “infringe” are those who use violence and abuse to “correct” public displays of gender.

Within the ultra-Orthodox community, there are voices – still scant and not nearly as vehement as they should be – that argue that the violent extremes are not representative of the ultra-Orthodox culture. Orthodox educator Yakov Horowitz writes:

AS AN EDUCATOR and a proud member of the haredi community, I appeal to all haredi Knesset members to display moxie and genuine leadership by calling a joint press conference where they repudiate all forms of violence and vow to bring to justice all those who perpetrate these types of attacks from this day forward… If elected officials cannot commit themselves to protecting innocent women from vicious beatings, they should all resign and be replaced by people who will.
There is no question in my mind that the vast, overwhelming majority of haredi [ultra-Orthodox] Jews worldwide feel as I do: disgraced and shamed when these events occur, and frustrated that there seems to be little that we can do to remove this stain from our shirts….The time has come for us to speak out, telling our children and students in unequivocal terms, “These people are criminals and sinners - and do not represent us!”

But the question of how widespread this culture is, or whether it “represents” all Orthodox communities, remains unclear. Shmarya Rosenberg of the “Failed Messiah” blog, takes issue with Horowitz and maintains that the entire Orthodox community is represented by these actions.

The idea that haredim [ultra-Orthodox] are not represented by or responsible for the actions of the modesty squads who often terrorize members on the fringe of the haredi community is false. So is the idea that these squads are “self-appointed..” Israel’s major modesty squad was founded at the direction of the then Gerrer Rebbe and it operates today with rabbinical backing…..Haredim docilely accept the dictatorship they live under as if it were divinely ordained, even though historically Jewish communities were – at least on paper – much more open, transparent and democratic.
And so, when thugs like Elhanan Buzaglo beat a defenseless woman, the haredi street bears partial responsibility, just as it bears partial responsibility when someone like Rabbi Yehuda Kolko molests another child, or when another hasidic rebbe or Lithuanian yeshiva head gets caught money laundering. Silence is both acquiescence and endorsement.

Rabbi Yakov Horowitz …seems to think that a few thousand (or perhaps fewer) haredim who may distance themselves from Buzaglo’s actions after reading it somehow proves Buzaglo and his fellow thugs acted alone. But this could not be further from the truth. Rabbi Horowitz knows this….Elhanan Buzaglo represents you, Rabbi Horowitz, just as he represents all haredim.

Violence against women is a growing phenomenon in Israel, increasingly justified with twisted rhetorics, and spreading to every corner of society. This troubling and life-threatening practice that will continue to grow until more people speak out. I just hope there is louder opposition – before the next tragedy occurs.