Women of the Wall was able to pray with a Torah scroll after bringing one into the Western Wall plaza the previous evening and keeping it there all night. Western Wall regulations bar the group, which conducts monthly morning prayer services at the site, from bringing a Torah scroll to its service. To circumvent the…
Israel Police officers detained a women’s rights activist at the Western Wall and confiscated her Torah scroll. Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, a Women of the Wall board member, was taken into police custody prior to a service Friday and released shortly afterwards, The Jerusalem Post reported. Women of the Wall runs gender egalitarian services at the…
I’m looking at the lines in my notebook “Bonna Devora Haberman [email protected]” written carefully in neat precise handwriting. I had never imagined that only a few weeks after she gave me her email, Rabbi Haberman would no longer be in this world. Although she apparently had cancer for a while, in my blindness she didn’t…
I first met Bonna in London in late 1985. She and Shmuel and Tiferet were living on the attic floor of an old house in Hampstead while she finished her Phd. I had never met a couple like Bonna and Shmuel before. They moved to their own beat. They were quirky, charming, funny, eclectic. I…
Bonna Devora Haberman, the founder of Women of the Wall, a group pressing for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, has died. Haberman, a Canadian-born scholar, author and activist who lived in Israel and the United States, died Tuesday of cancer, The Jerusalem Post reported. Haberman taught at Harvard, Brandeis and the Hebrew University of…
For the second time in less than two months, a feminist prayer group has succeeded in bringing a Torah scroll into the women’s section of the Western Wall, in defiance of existing regulations at the Jewish holy site in Jerusalem. This morning, an organization known as Original Women of the Wall held a prayer service…
On a sunny morning last month, I was swept into the women’s section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in a flurry of aggression directed at the Women of the Wall, the Israeli group fighting for women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s holiest site. (JTA) One of the group’s male supporters, Charlie Kalech, was strangled and thrown…
A request by Women of the Wall to hold a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony in the women’s section of the holy site was denied. Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbinic authority of the Western Wall and holy places, denied its request, Women of the Wall said in a statement Sunday. According to the group, Rabinowitz said the…
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