Single Ladies Want Mikveh Access
Image by Creative Commons
The latest fight in Israel is not over where women sit on the bus or walk on the street, but about where they can immerse.
Some Israeli women are petitioning the country’s Supreme Court, asking it to reverse official directives that restrict ritual bath usage to married women, and bar women who are single, divorced or widowed.
Attorneys filed the legal papers on behalf of two separate parties, Plia Oryah and Amital Zaks, as well as The Center for Women’s Justice, and the Orthodox feminist group Kolech. The petition claims that prohibiting unmarried women from using a mikveh amounts to the violation of their religious freedom and their right to privacy.
Furious about this religious coercion, Oryah, the single, 19-year-old daughter of immigrants from New York, said “it makes my life miserable once a month.” In order to ritually bathe, she has either gone to the seashore after dark, or deceived “mikveh ladies” by disguising herself as a married woman.
“Without any regard to a relationship I would still go to the mikveh every month,” she told Haaretz. “I feel a sense of renewal. It is an amazing, wonderful experience.”
The state has been adhering to an interpretation of Jewish law that prohibits unmarried women from ritually immersing. Some fear that a more open mikveh policy would encourage premarital sexual relations.
The petitioners say that rabbis can try to dissuade single women from going to the mikveh, but that denying them access is a violation of their civil rights.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
