[WCUSP] Jerusalem's 'Rosa Parks' Fights 'Modesty Patrols' (NPR)

Wed Feb 14 07:49:45 CST 2007

Sorry for any duplicate e-mails, my computer lost
control or was it me. In peace Yvonne
--- lieve 
> From: Shebar Windstone 
> 
> 
>
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7361060
> 
> Middle East
> 
> 
> Jerusalem's 'Rosa Parks' Fights 'Modesty Patrols'
>  
>  
>  
>  
> Gali Tibbon
> An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man rides a bus in
> Jerusalem in early February. AFP/Getty Images
> 
> Morning Edition, February 12, 2007 · A group of
> Israeli women are fighting back against what one
> called "Taliban-like" Jewish fundamentalists who
> order women to sit in the back of the bus and to
> abstain from wearing "immodest" clothing on public
> bus lines used primarily by ultra-Orthodox Jews. The
> women have filed a lawsuit in Israel's High Court
> aimed at reforming the bus lines. Some of the women
> see the bus dispute as part of a larger struggle
> against the growing influence and radicalization of
> the ultra-Orthodox in Israel.
> 
> Writer Naomi Ragen says she didn not want to start a
> revolution from her bus seat or become the Jewish
> Rosa Parks. She just wanted to get home. An
> observant, Orthodox Jew, Ragen was on the No. 40 bus
> line, headed to her house near Jerusalem, when an
> ultra-Orthodox  or Haredi  man told her to move to
> the back. 
> 
> "I was astonished," Ragen recalled. "And I said 'I'm
> not bothering anyone, you don't have to look at me,
> sit next to me  but as long as this is a public
> bus, I will sit where I please, thank you very
> much.'" 
> 
> But the harassment grew worse, Ragen says, at every
> stop: Soon an even more aggressive, bearded
> ultra-Orthodox man got on and commanded her to move.
> He was about 300 pounds and hovered over her like a
> sumo wrestler, she says, his long black frock and
> wide hat in her face. 
> 
> "And he started screaming and yelling," she said,
> telling her "in no uncertain terms" to "move to the
> back of the bus  or else."
> 
> "My reaction to that was I looked him in the eye and
> said 'Look, you show me in the code of Jewish law
> where it's written that I'm not allowed to sit in
> this seat and I'll move,'" Ragen said. "'Until then,
> get out of my face!'" 
> 
> Naomi Ragen may have been the Haredi's worst target:
> The feisty 57-year-old New York-born novelist and
> feminist has signed on to a new legal challenge to
> the de facto gender-segregation on more than 30
> public bus lines in Israel and the restrictions
> randomly enforced by men and self-styled "modesty
> patrols." 
> 
> "I call this the Taliban lines," Ragen said. "They
> can call them whatever they want, to me it's the
> Taliban lines and there's no reason we should not
> have them in Israel. I think it's important women
> have taken a stand and gone to the Supreme Court and
> said 'we're angry and not going to take it
> anymore.'"
> 
> Ten years ago, as part of a pilot project, two bus
> lines dedicated to the ultra-Orthodox community were
> launched. 
> 
> Today  unofficially  there are more than 30
> gender-segregated Haredi bus routes. In many cases
> these buses are half the price and the only lines
> running between some cities and neighborhoods. They
> look like every other public bus: there are no signs
> telegraphing that they're aimed at the ultra
> Orthodox. 
> 
> There are no written or overtly stated "rules" about
> gender segregation, either. It's just the way it is,
> says one rider who asked not to be named during a
> recent ride on the No. 40 bus in Jerusalem.
> 
> As the bus approached a Haredi neighborhood, four
> school girls got up from their seats and moved to
> the back of the bus. None wanted to talk to a
> reporter.
> 
> The lawsuit before Israel's high court alleges that
> several women have been harassed, humiliated,
> taunted and even physically assaulted on the buses.
> In December a Canadian Orthodox Jew was on a
> non-Haredi bus line en route to the Western Wall,
> Judaism's holiest site, when she was assaulted by an
> ultra-Orthodox man for refusing to move to the back
> of the bus. She has signed on to the suit. 
> 
> "She was physically hurt, beaten very hard," said
> Orly Erez-Likhowski, an attorney with the Israel
> Movement for Progressive Judaism, who is leading the
> legal fight against the Ministry of Transportation
> and the Egged bus company, a quasi-private line
> heavily subsidized by the state. 
> 
> The Ministry refused to comment on tape. A spokesman
> said only that while the ministry approves new
> lines, the seating arrangements are left to the bus
> company. 
> 
> The bus company released a statement saying they let
> the ultra Orthodox enforce their own rules. The
> company says its own surveys show that the general
> public wants "to respect the Haredi-religious sector
> that uses public transportation and to let them
> behave in a way that is convenient to them." 
> 
> Erez-Likhowski said the suit doesn't aim to shut the
> bus lines down, but to have them regulated and
> reformed or to have an equal number of non-Haredi
> lines added. 
> 
> "The ministry is basically saying 'this is not our
> business,'" Erez-Likhwoski said. His response?
> "Well, it's exactly your business to supervise
> public bus companies and this is what you've failed
> to do over the past years." 
> 
> Supporters say the legal challenge is part of a
> wider religious and cultural struggle against what
> some see as the growing radicalism and political
> clout of the ultra Orthodox. Last month, senior
> Haredi rabbis in Jerusalem led a public burning of
> see-through stockings and other allegedly risque
> dress. 
> 
> Before a gay pride march last fall, Haredi men
> rioted nightly for weeks, forcing organizers to hold
> a toned-down rally in a heavily guarded stadium
> instead of a public march. 
> 
> The Haredi recently launched a short boycott of El
> Al, Israel's national airline, after the company
> flew on the Sabbath following a flight bottleneck
> prompted by a labor strike. The airline quickly
> caved and pledged never to fly on the Sabbath
> without approval from ultra-Orthodox Rabbis.
> 
> And in a major decision last month a committee of
> leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis here ruled that Haredi
> women should no longer be allowed to get academic
> degrees beyond high school. 
> 
> It's a potentially devastating edict in a Haredi
> culture where many women are the main family bread
> winner while the men study Torah full time. 
> 
> Ragen says these moves are merely more attempts to
> control women.
> 
> "I think it's shocking," she said. "More and more
> streets have signs saying 'women only with modest
> dress,' so our streets are being taken over. What's
> the next step? People want separate lines at the
> supermarket? Maybe we'll have separate sides of the
> street and right after that come the veils."
> 
> But opponents call the lawsuit an attack on Haredi
> religious values and culture. Israeli educator and
> writer Shira Leibowitz-Schmidt, of the Haredi
> College for Women, says the gender segregation is a
> natural attempt by the ultra Orthodox to combat what
> they see as secular Israel's growing permissiveness
> and the eroticization of public spaces. 
> 
> "Today in Israel women go around sometimes as if
> they're at the beach," she said. "It's really very
> undignified and it's erotically stimulating and it's
> also just distracting. And that's a form of coercion
>  I call that non-religious coercion. I call that
> coercion of eroticism. That's a much more serious
> problem: the creeping degradation of the public
> square." 
> 
> The de facto Haredi bus restrictions, she says, help
> men focus on their family  and their wife  and
> avoid distractions. 
> 
> The legal challenge to the gender-segregated Haredi
> bus lines is scheduled to go before Israel's High
> Court later this year.
> 
> (Because of intense interest in the
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NPR makes available
> free transcripts of its coverage. The transcript for
> this story will be available soon. Please check back
> later today or tomorrow.)
> > _______________________________________________
> womeninblack mailing list
> womeninblack at listas.nodo50.org
>
http://listas.nodo50.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/womeninblack
> this is the international WiB mailing-out list, for
> the INTERACTIVE WiB e-list, go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/interactiveWiB


____________________________________________________________________________________
Any questions? Get answers on any topic at www.Answers.yahoo.com.  Try it now.
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
womeninblack mailing list
womeninblack at listas.nodo50.org
http://listas.nodo50.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/womeninblack
this is the international WiB mailing-out list, for the INTERACTIVE WiB e-list, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/interactiveWiB