Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men Vandalize Buses Displaying Images of Young Girls

Earlier this month a group of activists, who fought for and won the right for women to pray at Jerusalem's Western Wall, launched a new effort to hold Bat Mitzvah ceremonies for Jewish girls at the holy site. But Women of the Wall's public bus campaign has quickly become a target of vandalism, escalating on Monday night when a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men ripped off the ads featuring young girls holding torah scrolls and slashed the tires on the vehicles.

The buses were reportedly parked in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem when an estimated 50 haredi men attacked them. In addition to slashing tires and defacing the girls faces, the vandals threw stones and spray painted "end the obscene pictures" on the side of at least one vehicle, according to video from YNet.

"It's really disturbing to me," Shira Pruce, a spokeswoman for the Women of the Wall, told VICE News about the incident. "It's not your average property damage, it's really particularly focused on images of women."

According to Pruce, approximately 50 buses have had images of girls defaced since the campaign kicked off on October 12. She said these have been deliberate acts of vandalism targeted at the photos of the girls aged 11 to 14. Modesty rules promote strict gender separation in public and religious spaces in many ultra-Orthodox communities, as well as barring images of women from newspapers and advertisements. Similarly men cannot listen to women sing or watch them perform.

The Bat Mitzvah campaign was launched to allow girls to hold the official ceremonies for the traditional coming of age ritual at the wall. There are tens of thousands of Bar Mitzvahs, the male equivalent, held for boys at the site every year, while girls are designated to a location nearby.

The main obstacle for the Women of the Wall in pushing this practice has been that visitors are not allowed to bring their own Torah scrolls to the wall, an important requirement of the ceremony. The ones available to the public are kept out of reach in the men's section.

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"We're inviting Israeli girls to join us for Bat Mitzvahs at the Wall," Pruce said. "Women's rights are not equal at the Western Wall and we need full equality for that to happen."

According to Pruce, ultra-Orthodox aggression towards the group had died down over the last six months, likely because of conflict and political turmoil in Israel. However, as is often the case, she said social conflict between the Orthodox community and mainstream Israeli society has bubbled up as the security situation calmed down — the timing coinciding with the ad campaign.

For more than 25 years the Women of the Wall group has pushed for gender equality at the Western Wall. For a long time their efforts were not well received in Israel, but Elana Sztokman, a sociologist and Orthodox Jewish expert, told VICE News that the group's status among the community at large began to evolve in 2011 when women started getting arrested for singing and praying at the site. The Women of the Wall received further validation in 2013 when a Jerusalem court ruled in their favor, saying women should be permitted to pray at the Wall.

"That's not to say there aren't people in the Orthodox Community who aren't nasty, there are, but there's much more sympathy than there was seven or eight years ago," Sztokman said.

However, this doesn't extend to the most extreme individuals of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, and recent events are just the latest examples of those members defacing pictures of women. According to Sztokman, religious extremists have been vandalizing images of women on billboards and buses for the last decade. So much so that in the past some bus companies decided not to display ads with women in order to avoid damage to their fleets.

"It's extreme misogyny that's now fueling Haredi culture and it's spreading and getting worse," she said, explaining that when looking at ultra-Orthodox newspapers from just 40 years ago you can find images of women. Now, however, Sztokman said you won't even find mentions of women, even wedding announcements only feature the groom's name. A high-profile example of this occurred after the death of Osama Bin Laden when a Hasidic paper in Brooklyn photoshopped Hillary Clinton out of the infamous situation room photo in that day's edition.

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For the Women of the Wall, the solution to this vandalization and equality problem will be to go ahead with their first official Bat Mitzvah at the wall on Friday, scroll included. "We believe we are going well within our rights," Pruce said of the upcoming event, adding that they have concocted a way to use a scroll in the ceremony.

Going forward, Sztokman said the government needs to take a stand by arresting the bus vandals specifically, as well as addressing the vandalization issue in general. "The government has to take a zero tolerance policy against religious extremism, especially religious extremism used against women," she said.

Follow Kayla Ruble on Twitter: @RubleKB

Photo via Women of the Wall