Clash over ‘Wall for all’ heats up
Israel should ignore the feelings of American Jews and break promises for a non-Orthodox prayer section at the Kotel.
Israel should ignore the feelings of American Jews and break promises for a non-Orthodox prayer section at the Kotel, a powerful member of the ruling Likud party has declared.
Nine months after the cabinet promised to loosen ultra-Orthodox control over the Western Wall by creating a permanent area where the non-Orthodox and religious feminists can pray as they want, David Amsalem told the Knesset’s Interior Committee that the plan should be scrapped.
“If American Jews take offence that’s okay,” said Amsalem, a member of the Knesset’s Lobby for US-Israel Relations, in a comment that was quickly interpreted as offensive to all Diaspora Jews.
Gilad Kariv, director of the Israeli Reform movement, told The AJN that he believes Amsalem was showing disdain for the whole Diaspora and said: “This rude comment shows that Amsalem is not sensitive to the strategic needs of the State of Israel and doesn’t care about engagement of Diaspora Jews with Israel.”
Amsalem made his comment on Tuesday during a stormy discussion of the influential Interior Committee about the Kotel plan, which seems to have hit a dead end due to the opposition of ultra-Orthodox parties in the ruling coalition.
The day before the meeting, the ultra-Orthodox Interior Minister Aryeh Deri affirmed his opposition to the plan in Knesset, lampooning the Reform and Conservative movements. “Is this the Judaism we want?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t want this Judaism, okay. I prefer the original, and I don’t want these imitations, it’s not the Jewish religion.”
Deri said that pressure from these movements for prayer space at the Kotel “is about a political and ideological fight of the first order in which they are trying to take every [religious] arrangement of the last 70 years and to destroy it, and to create arguments and provocations within the Jewish people”.
Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, later took issue with Deri’s statement. “I may not be as pious as the Minister of the Interior, but I observe Shabbat and attend an Orthodox synagogue,” said Sharansky. “And I say clearly that I will not give up on a single Jew or a single immigrant. I say to all Jews, without distinction, that I want them and their prayers and their rabbis here in Israel.”
Members of the Reform and Conservative communities in Israel are furious at the non-implementation of the Kotel plan, as are many Diaspora leaders, especially in America. Last week activists from Israel and the Diaspora expressed their frustration by marching towards the women’s section of the Kotel, where Torah scrolls aren’t allowed, carrying Torahs.
Men in ultra-Orthodox dress, and security staff employed by the Western Wall, pushed and shoved the protesters. Some demonstrators fended off attempts to grab their scrolls. Then, the protesters reached the women’s section and read from scrolls – and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised the protesters for their “unilateral violation of the status quo”.
On the heels of this development, Amsalem’s committee arranged a visit to the Kotel for Tuesday, followed by a meeting at Knesset. There were impassioned calls for the Kotel plan to be implemented. “The wall is sacred to all Jews, not only the Orthodox, and it must be accessible,” said Merav Michaeli of the opposition Zionist Union party. But Amsalem insisted that cancelling the compromise would “lower the flames” and “lessen the disagreement”.
NATHAN JEFFAY
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