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Bibi to Jewish Agency: Look Into Women’s Prayer at Western Wall

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly has asked the Jewish Agency to come up with a solution for non-Orthodox women’s groups who want to pray at the Western Wall.

Netanyahu asked Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky to examine the issue, the Associated Press reported citing an unnamed Israeli government official.

The AP quoted Jewish Agency spokesman Benjamin Rutland as saying that Netanyahu told Sharansky that the Western Wall “must remain a source of Jewish unity rather than division.”

Earlier this month, four women were detained at the Western Wall by Israeli police for trying to enter the site with prayer shawls to pray with the Women of the Wall organization. Women of the Wall has held a special prayer service at the holy site almost each month for the last 20 years on Rosh Chodesh, or the beginning of a new Hebrew month, at the back of the women’s section.

Women participating in the Rosh Chodesh service have been arrested nearly every month since June for wearing prayer shawls or for “disturbing public order.”

In 2003, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld a government ban on women wearing tefillin or tallit prayer shawls, or reading from a Torah scroll at the Western Wall.

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