Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Brave Beauty Queen Who Refused To Go to Back of Israeli Bus

(Haaretz) — An ultra-Orthodox resident of Beit Shemesh was convicted of sexual harassment yesterday for calling a female Israel Defense Forces soldier a “prostitute” after she refused to move to the back of a bus.

The soldier, Doron Matalon, who has since started a modeling career, won second place in Tuesday night’s televised “Miss Israel” beauty pageant.

The incident took place in December 2011 on a gender-segregated bus in Jerusalem. Moshe Fuchs, 44, asked a woman paying the driver at the front of the bus to go to the back. Matalon, sitting in the front, told him women could sit wherever they wanted to. The defendant said to her, “Who asked you, prostitute, go to the back. You’re standing among yeshiva students and it’s a disgrace.”

At that point other ultra-Orthodox men joined Fuchs and yelled at her “prostitute” and “shikse” (gentile woman), Matalon said.

At that point she “felt threatened and a huge commotion began. I yelled out for the conductor to come quick, and two male conductors rushed in. They pushed him away from me and said: ‘Why are you shouting, she’s a soldier,’ but he continued to be abusive.”

Fuchs asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court to acquit him because the incident was “trivial.” Magistrate Hagit Kalmanovitch rejected this argument and said the defendant’s misconduct was grievous.

She wrote in her verdict that he had embarrassed the soldier in public “without an apology and without expressing regret.” The incident was also grave “because the defendant acted as part of a social practice of excluding women on segregated lines in particular and in public in general,” said the judge.

For more stories, go to Haaretz.com or to subscribe to Haaretz, click here and use the following promotional code for Forward readers: FWD13.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.