TEL AVIV — David Sharan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s U.S.-born chief of staff, who is heading negotiations on an egalitarian Western Wall plaza, will be the Israeli Cabinet’s next secretary. In April, Netanyahu tapped Sharan to run reopened discussion on an agreement to expand the non-Orthodox prayer platform at the Western Wall, allowing progressive…
Israel’s attorney general banned Women of the Wall from holding a priestly blessing ceremony at the Western Wall. The group, which advocates for women’s right to perform rituals that the Western Wall’s Orthodox authorities maintain are reserved for men, had planned to hold a ceremony featuring the traditional prayer on Sunday, April 24. On Thursday,…
It might be hard to imagine the hardline Israeli Haredi parties and the hardline feminist “Original Women of the Wall” group as occupying the same library, much less the same page. But that’s where they find themselves. It’s not just that both are hardline, and that both reject the compromise idea of an egalitarian Western…
When the Israeli cabinet approved a proposal intended to resolve a festering conflict between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall, no one seemed to notice the parallels between this “two-wall solution” and the “two-state solution” that many leaders have proposed to resolve the long-simmering conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Both of these “solutions”…
TEL AVIV — The Conservative and Reform movements in Israel are considering some drastic measures as part of a planned offensive over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem for egalitarian prayer if the government backs away from a long and drawn-out compromise to which it agreed. With that plan now at risk due to…
Over the past few months I have repeatedly been asked my opinion about the compromise agreement — now itself — to create an egalitarian prayer space adjacent to the Western Wall. As I watched women and men with tallitot and tefillin reading from the Torah and singing in celebration, I was grateful that after many years…
The Kotel prayer agreement appears to be going south — leaving us to ask how Israeli leaders from across the spectrum failed to deliver on an agreement that looked like a done deal. “The deal” of course, is about the Kotel, or Western Wall, and Robinson’s Arch — and who gets to pray where and how. These…
The historic compromise that would have created an egalitarian prayer section at the holy Western Wall has been compromised. Under intense pressure from his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that “several difficulties arose” with the painstakingly-negotiated deal and that new talks will be held. The difficulties? It comes down to…
