An Orthodox Jew heckles
women as they pray at the
Western Wall in Jerusalem's
old city on June 4: Dozens of
Jewish women, some draped in
prayer shawls, prayed out loud
at the Western Wall

Photos by AP/Elizabeth Dalziel

Womens prayer groups at the Western Wall continue to create

R

JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR

Special to the Jewish News

abbi Debrah Cohen barely remembers her
first visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
She was 15, on a trip with her parents.
Fast-forward to adulthood. In Israel for a
year, Rabbi Cohen returned to the Wall — the western
portion of the Temple Mount that held the Second
Temple, which the Romans destroyed in 70 C.E.
At the Wall, Rabbi Cohen joined a group of
women who met monthly on Rosh Chodesh, a
minor holiday marked by the new moon. She went
there for the camaraderie, for the sense of sisterhood
and a chance to pray together as Jewish women.
It was the early 1990s, and there was a tension in
the group because the Israeli government forbade
women to pray aloud at the Wall. But they did so
anyway, singing softly. The government's ruling
bothered Rabbi Cohen, whose most recent pulpit

12/8
2000

6

was at Congregation T'Chiyah, a Reconstructionist
group that meets in Royal Oak.
"It was just wonderful to pray with the women at
the Wall. It was a very spiritual experience," she
recalled. "But while we could sing aloud together, we
had to be restrained. Here we are, at the Kotel
[Western Wall], praying, and we can't sing with our
full voices. That was very painful."
While Israel struggles to find peace with the
Palestinians, it is also wrestling with the divisive
issue of who has religious control of the Western
Wall, a physical symbol for millennia of Judaism's
endurance despite adversity.
Although the rock throwing and physical violence
between the Palestinians and the Israelis has the
potential to escalate into full-scale war, the issue of
who can pray, and how they are allowed to pray, at
the Kotel has become an explosive internal issue,
further dividing Israeli Jews along religious lines.
The Western Wall, Judaism's holiest spot, tradition-

ally has been the site where Jews hold regular
minyanim (services), read aloud from the Torah and
wear tallitot (prayer shawls) and kippot (skullcaps).
But these Jews had to be men, according to an edict
by the country's Ministry of Religion, which controls
the space. Segregated by a curtain, or mechitza,
women had to pray silently; some of those who tried
to worship in the same way as the men were taunted.
That changed on May 22, when the Israel Supreme
Court (the High Court of Justice) ruled that women
could pray aloud from the Torah while wearing talli-
tot on certain days on their side of the mechitza. The
high court ordered the government to pay the origi-
nal group of women, who filed a lawsuit more than a
decade ago to alter the law, the equivalent of about
$4,800 in damages. It insisted the women receive
police protection when they came to pray.
"It is unacceptable that concern about a violent
reaction by any sector of the public will lead to the
denial of the exercise by another sector of its right,"

