REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK'I EXPECTED ANGER. I DID NOT EXPECT HATRED'
At Bnei Brak women’s rights march, angry rhetoric drowns out Haredi-secular dialogue
Thousands of liberals rally in ultra-Orthodox city, with one organizer urging the jailing of rabbis, but others find common ground amid minor scuffles, drumming and loud music
By CANAAN LIDORToday, 3:17 am 112
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Nili Brenner, right, speaks with Dana Betzalel at the women's march in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023. (Canaan Lidor/The Times of Israel)
A women’s rights march by thousands of liberals in the predominantly Haredi city of Bnei Brak on Thursday night provided an unlikely backdrop for heartfelt dialogue between devout and secular Israelis at a time of growing estrangement between their demographics.
The amity lasted for about 30 minutes.
After that, any possibility of a discussion was drowned by loud music, thunderous drumming and bellicose rhetoric from both sides at the event, organized to protest what activists view as the exclusion and oppression of women in Haredi society and by the Haredi-backed government.
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Rabbis who object to women singing in public should be jailed, speaker Ayelet Hashachar told the crowd. Haredim who “fight not with but against the country,” should feel disturbed by the protests, she added.
Right-wing counter-protesters answered the rally by hollering “leftist traitors” at the marchers. There were a few minor scuffles that ended without injuries or arrests.
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But the margins of the protest also saw people from opposite camps holding impromptu discussions that, while they were sometimes short, heated and blunt, afforded them a rare insight into each other’s belief systems despite the polarization eroding what common ground they share.
In one such conversation, Dana Betzalel, a 34-year-old Haredi radio presenter on Jewish heritage and a poet, told Nili Brenner, a 62-year-old from Tel Aviv: “Because of anti-Haredi incitement, I feel less safe walking around in a secular area than ever before, and certainly less safe than in a Haredi area,” adding: “And this march is supposed to be about respecting other people?”
Protesters march from Ramat Gan to Bnei Brak to protest against discrimination and exclusion of women, August 24, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Betzalel was among several Haredi women who handed out water bottles and wristbands emblazoned with the words: “Love thy neighbor,” an initiative she said was meant to encourage dialogue.
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Brenner, 62, wearing shorts and a tank top with stickers, acknowledged Betzalel’s feeling of insecurity. “That’s terrible. I’m really sorry to hear that. But there’s tremendous anger. And I too am feeling insecure. There are laws of this government, supported by your community’s leaders, that are limiting my freedom. Can you grasp how that feels?” she asked.
Several speakers at the rally referred to the Haredi public and its leaders as willing partners in a push to quash civil liberties and coerce millions of secular and non-Jewish Israelis to abide by Orthodox Jewish principles.
Thousands of marchers attend a protest rally for women’s rights in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023. (Raya Barkan)
Multiple references in their speeches noted cases reported in secular media in recent weeks in which women or girls were documented receiving discriminatory treatment on public transportation. Many bus lines serving Haredi areas unofficially segregate seating by sex, and passengers deemed to be in immodest attire can sometimes be harassed. An attempt by anti-judicial overhaul supporters to generate dialogue over this with Haredi bus passengers devolved into rival groups chanting politically loaded songs at each other earlier this month.
The overhaul, promoted by the government and the coalition of five religious parties and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, is designed to weaken the ability of secular Israelis to safeguard their liberties in court, several of the speakers at the rally said.
Protesters at a women’s march in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023, carry a sign reading “What was shall not be: we are drawing a line.” (Dan Bar Dov)
Advocates of the push say the aim of the overhaul is to uphold the liberties of conservatives from abuse by a liberal judiciary, and that it restores the balance of power to a time predating a creeping power grab by the judiciary that allegedly began in the 1990s.
“We’ve come to protest the attempt by the government, in cooperation with the Haredi leadership, to make Israel less liberal, less equal to women,” said Amit Aharon, an activist with the Pink Front feminist group.
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Counter-protesters at a women’s rally in Bnei Brak, Israel, on Aug. 24, 2023 carry a banner reading “leftist traitors.” (Canaan Lidor/The Times of Israel)
Before the speeches, the powerful amplification system blasted popular pop songs. One, whose title means “all options are on the table,” included lyrics such as: “I said it once and I’ll repeat / I have a round in the chamber, not in the clip / for everything, there’s a time / and a moment of truth and a red line,” though others were of a less loaded nature.
That song, a popular number among overhaul protesters, drew loud boos from the 300-odd counter-protesters, most of whom were non-Haredi right-wing activists. Some of Bnei Brak’s leading rabbis had issued a text calling on locals to stay away from the protesters to avoid friction, resulting in a scarce Haredi presence.
Haredi teen Moran Attias, 16, didn’t hear of the call and looked slightly alarmed when The Times of Israel asked her what made her ignore it. “I just wanted to talk to the women from Tel Aviv and tell them what it’s really like,” she said.
Inbal Bar-Sela from Haifa, wearing a tank top reading “Democracy is everything to us” attends the women’s march in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023. (Canaan Lidor/The Times of Israel)
Sex segregation is “a sign of respect for women, not exclusion,” she told a secular woman, Inbal Bar-Sela, a 57-year-old psychotherapist who came to the protest from Haifa. Bar-Sela did not dispute this, but said: “I work with a Haredi woman who can’t drive because if she does her sons won’t get into a good yeshiva.” Attias nodded and said: “Yes, that happens in extreme communities. That’s not us, our mom drives us everywhere, she’s like Egged,” Attias said jokingly, referencing the bus company.
Oz Kostika, a 27-year-old Haredi special education professional, was one of the locals who knowingly ignored the rabbinical text to stay away, which he said was advisory and not binding.
“You have a misconception about us,” he told a group of female protesters. “This is a place where women are respected much more than in your society. You’re fishing for an inappropriate incident here and there and using it to vilify all of us and insult us in our home with this protest. It’s very painful.”
Oz Kostika speaks with a participant in the women’s march in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023. (Canaan Lidor/The Times of Israel)
Prominent individuals criticized the organizers for the decision to march in Bnei Brak, which they saw as a provocation.
Tamar Ish Shalom, a presenter for Channel 13, called it “wrong and unnecessary” on X, formerly Twitter. “Demonstrating against a whole section of the population, a whole city, men, women, and children, is not the way. It’s wrong on a moral level and may not serve the struggle, which is more important now than ever,” she wrote.
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Tzippi Lavi, a Haredi woman who describes herself as a feminist and has participated in protests against the overhaul, told Channel 13 this week that the march was “painful to all Haredim because it’s against our group but also disrespectful of the efforts of feminists in Haredi circles. We’re making progress that you on the outside can’t see and marches like this undo our work.”
Dana Betzalel and Haredi children hand out water and wristbands promoting neighborly love at the women’s march in Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 24, 2023. (Canaan Lidor/The Times of Israel)
Tomer Persico, a lecturer on religion at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem and the Department for Comparative Religion of Tel Aviv University, defended the protest on X. It is “necessary to demonstrate in Haredi cities if this is done respectfully,” he wrote. “The Haredi population needs to understand that its representatives have started a fight with the liberal public in Israel and that this public will not take it lying down: It will come at a price.”
Several speakers made reference to the fact that tens of thousands of Haredi yeshiva students get exempted from military service annually as part of a controversial arrangement. The draft exemptions have fueled anger and resentment among secular Jewish Israelis who say the ultra-Orthodox should carry some of society’s burdens.
Haredi men and anti-overhaul activists argue aboard a bus bound for Bnei Brak, Israel on Aug. 16, 2023. (Courtesy of Brothers in Arms)
“People who didn’t serve in the army get us into war, people who don’t pay taxes take our money for stipends,” said Hashachar, a founder of the Mothers’ Front, one of the groups that co-organized the march.
Her address, rife with anti-Haredi sentiment and tropes, promised more to come. She called Bnei Brak a “city that has given nothing to Israel and has no military plots in its cemeteries.” Hashachar pledged that “if anyone thinks our presence here is poking them in the eye, get ready to have two eyes poked.”
“We will come to Bnei Brak week after week until the population of Bnei Brak understands it’s part of Israeli society, it needs to serve the country because when they’re reading a page in the Talmud, we groan under anxiety for our children’s safety,” she said. “We fight for the country, they fight against the country.”
That kind of rhetoric left Kostika feeling “depressed and deflated.”
“I came here to speak to people on the other side and I was expecting anger,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting hatred.”