Masorti Leaders Challenge Oren's Remarks on Tallit Arrest
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Leaders of the Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel today sent Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. a letter questioning recent remarks which seemed to criticize accounts of a woman who was arrested at the Kotel for wearing a prayer shawl.
Ambassador Michael Oren, speaking at last week’s convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said that the young woman, Nofrat Frenkel, was not arrested but merely “led away” by police from the prayer area at the Kotel when haredi men became aware she was wearing a tallit.
The report of his statement can be read at the bottom of the Forward story here.
Oren’s statement is directly contradicted by Frenkel’s first-person account, published in the Forward here, and by other women who were part of the Women of the Wall group which was trying to pray at the Wall on the first day of the new Jewish month. The account of one of them, Anat Hoffman, can be read here.
Now Rabbi Alan Silverstein and David Lissy, the chair and chief executive, respectively, of the Conservative movement’s foundation to support Masorti communities in Israel, have written Oren a letter saying that they are “astonished” by his “somewhat disparaging” remarks about the Frenkel affair at the United Synagogue conference.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Forward, they write:
It is always good to deal with facts. Nofrat Frenkel’s first person account, not disputed by any participant or published report, indicates that if ‘arrest’ is not the proper term under Israeli law to describe what happened, some equally harsh term would fit.
The Masorti Foundation leaders go on to recount the facts as related by Frenkel and others, and conclude the letter by writing:
November 20, 2009, 2:55pm
Orthodox Rabbi to Michael Oren: Arrest of Woman in Tallit 'Offensive and Dangerous'
By Gabrielle Birkner
Following the recent arrest at the Western Wall of a woman wearing a Jewish prayer shawl, or tallit, a prominent American Modern Orthodox rabbi has requested that Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren meet with “a rabbinic delegation of American Orthodox rabbis who strongly support the right of women to wear a tallit and tzitzit.”
In a letter to Oren, penned this morning, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the spiritual leader of Ohev Sholom National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., called the arrest Monday of Nofrat Frenkel “offensive and dangerous,” adding: “You are ceding the Temple Mount and its holiness to a group of fundamentalist and exclusionary Jews who increasingly do not share that prophetic vision.”
An adapted version of the letter — it can be read in full, below — was published on former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum’s Web site FrumForum.
“If a Jew had been arrested for wearing a prayer shawl in any other country in the world, there would be outrage,” Herzfeld told The Sisterhood. “Just because it’s the state of Israel doing it doesn’t make it acceptable. It’s not coming from antisemitism, but it’s still religious persecution.”
November 18, 2009, 12:12pm
Woman of the Wall Arrest: A First-Hand Account
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
As they do at the start of every month, Israel’s Women of the Wall went to the Kotel on Wednesday to celebrate Rosh Chodesh.
But this time, instead of services concluding with the Musaf prayer, the experience ended with a 25 year old participant, a medical student who was wearing a tallit and carrying the group’s new Torah scroll, being arrested by police and charged with “performing a religious act that offends the feelings of others.”
The morning began pleasantly, Anat Hoffman told The Sisterhood. Hoffman chairs Women of the Wall (WoW) and is director of the Israel Religious Action Center, which is part of the Reform Movement.
Forty two women, including a group visiting from New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, gathered in the women’s section of the Kotel at 7 A.M. to pray the morning service. Then, because it is Rosh Chodesh Kislev, they sang Hallel, “in full voice,” said Hoffman. Sixteen of the women were wearing tallitot, she said, but “there was no complaint whatsoever from anyone.”
Ordinarily at this point in their service, WoW participants exit the Kotel plaza, walk around the enormous staircase leading up to the Dome of the Rock, proceed south and descend stairs to the archeological dig site nearby known as Robinson’s Arch, where they read from their Sefer Torah.
This is the location that Israel’s Supreme Court said they can use for their Torah readings, in its 2003 decision denying WoW the right to pray as a group at the Kotel.
This week, the women of WoW were celebrating a new Sefer Torah, one donated to them by Temple Sinai, a Reform congregation in Pittsburgh.
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