American Jews, in particular, are celebrating this development.
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A new organization that includes Women of the Wall and the Masorti and Reform movements and is led by the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel will administer the almost 10,000-square-foot non-Orthodox section, slightly less than half the size of the adjoining Orthodox area.
While there has been great opposition from the Orthodox and ultra-nationalist establishment, the initiative is a significant step forward for women’s rights, as well as Reform and Conservative equality. While the Reform and Conservative denominations are the largest overseas they are a small minority in Israel and have little political clout.
Here, services for both men and women, as well as services led by women, will be officially permitted. They held monthly pray-ins at the Wall which frequently involved confrontation with the Wall’s Orthodox guardians. It is an ancient architecture of second Jewish Temple.
Since 1967, when Jerusalem’s Old City was liberated, the Kotel plaza served as a spiritual magnet for Jews of all denominational affiliations and beliefs. Such practice is a departure from Orthodox Jewish tradition, but it has nonetheless received the backing of Israel’s courts despite protests from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
That ruling may even have included a ordering a fully egalitarian prayer area be established at the Kotel proper and stripping the haredi Kotel rabbi of exclusive power over the holy site. But the Kotel was the remnant of the courtyard wall of the holy Second Temple; conduct there accordingly reflected that fact.
The decision to create the new prayer area-to be located at a spot called Robinson’s Arch, will be open 24 hours a day and eventually have a “majestic entrance”-is a “revolution for women and Jewish pluralism in Israel”, Women of the Wall spokeswoman Shira Pruce tells the Guardian”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firmly rejected statements by government ministers and members of the Knesset in the wake of this week’s approval of an egalitarian section at the Western Wall.
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Netanyahu’s statement comes after some government officials attacked liberal streams of Judaism and associated movements, who signed on to the agreement approved on Sunday, including the Reform and Conservative movement, Women of the Wall and the Jewish Agency.
