TEL AVIV—For years, Israeli women have been pressured into moving to the rear of public buses serving strictly religious Jews. Now, in confrontations reminiscent of the era of Rosa Parks, women are pushing back.
Doron Matalon, an 18-year-old soldier, says she was standing at the front of the No. 49a municipal bus after an overnight shift at her Jerusalem base on Wednesday morning last week when an ultra-Orthodox man ordered her to move back.
"I said that I have the right to sit here," she says. "Then a commotion ensued, and other people gathered around and started shouting….It was scary."
The conflict drew national media attention and highlighted the growing tensions in Israel as the population of once-insular ultra-Orthodox Jews has surged beyond the urban enclaves of Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, where they have lived for decades.
As the Orthodox seek jobs and housing in other areas, they are increasingly interacting with mainstream Israelis who see their strict code of religious practice to be coercive, and a threat to Israel's democracy.
"It's a slippery slope. What starts with women boarding the bus in the back because of modesty can end up with women not voting," says Mickey Gitzin, the director of Be Free Israel, a nonprofit that promotes religious pluralism. "It could turn Israeli society into a segregated society in which women don't have a place in public life."
In the past week, public outrage peaked following a TV report on the harassment of an 8-year-old girl by ultra-Orthodox men, in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh. The men spat on the girl and called her a prostitute for dressing in a way they considered to be immodest.
That spurred thousands of people to demonstrate against the segregation of women on Tuesday, Dec. 27; a counterprotest two days later ignited clashes in Jerusalem and in Beit Shemesh.
Haredi rabbis of Beit Shemesh said the women of their community observe modesty rules voluntarily because they are for women's honor and Judaism orders the separation of men and women in the public sphere.
Many ultra-Orthodox object to segregation, but have gone on the defensive. "The problem is that they want to make a secular state in the Holy Land. That's what creates the friction," said Israel Eichler, a parliament member from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.
Mr. Eichler alleged that Israel's secular media is focusing on the ultra-Orthodox treatment of women as a way of indirectly attacking a political ally of the Haredis—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly denounced segregation. Last week he insisted that "women will sit in every place."
Haredi political parties wield outsized clout because they often function as kingmakers of Israeli coalitions by moving between right and left, though their outlook is more in keeping with right-wing coalitions.
For decades, Israel's Haredi sects kept at a distance from the mainstream, congregating in self-contained ghettos. Their religious ideology rejected the foundations of the secular Jewish state even as they participated in its politics.
Because they made up a relatively small percentage of the population, they were allowed to avoid army service and oversee schools that shed elements of state curriculum, and lobbied for public subsidies that enabled graduates to continue religious study rather than pursue jobs.
In the 14 years since the first public buses went into operation in Jerusalem, exclusion and segregation efforts have expanded to include men-only sidewalks in ultra-Orthodox
neighborhoods, separated waiting rooms at some health clinics, and the gradual disappearance of women from billboard advertisements in Jerusalem.
With Haredi birthrates double the average Israeli family, ultra-Orthodox Jews are poised to surge from around 10% of the country's population. Economists say the status quo, where most Haredi men don't work, will eventually drag down the economy because the government won't be able to afford the rising cost of so many men staying out of the workplace.
The bus lines that initially served only ultra-Orthodox communities eventually spilled over into mixed areas. As the number of segregated bus lines grew into the dozens and complaints emerged, the liberal Israel Religious Action Center, an affiliate of the U.S. Reform Jewish movement, petitioned the Supreme Court to ban segregation on buses.
In a ruling in January 2011, the court said that while forced segregated buses were illegal in principle, it would be possible to allow them to operate for one year on a voluntary basis.
The ruling highlighted a dilemma for Israel's government in determining how to handle diverse religious and national groups that reject many of its basic principles.
"The deeper question is how does a democracy deal with separatist fundamentalist communities in its midst," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. "Israel's great domestic challenge is to figure out the balance between allowing cultural autonomy and reinforcing its sovereign authority."
With the one-year trial period about to end, the petitioners say they plan to press the Supreme Court again.
For Ms. Matalon, it might be too late. She says she fears riding the bus and hasn't returned for fear of harassment.
"It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last time," she says.
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