The struggle for religious pluralism in Israel will no longer move forward, one leading activist says.
“The coming years…will mean much more work out in the streets, much more work in the Supreme Court to maintain past achievements,” said Avinoam Armoni, the New Israel Fund’s director in Israel and the chair of a new coalition designed to fight an Orthodox monopoly.
“It’s a defense mode, more than anything else.”
The ad hoc coalition, formed since Israel’s elections in May, is called Mate Chofesh, or Freedom Front. The coalition’s formation isn’t a reaction to a Likud-led government per se, but to the new strength of three religious parties.
Mate Chofesh’s slogan: “Judaism Without Coercion.”
“We define it as an urgent emergency struggle for the pluralistic, democratic nature of Israel,” Armoni said this week in San Francisco.
Armoni was visiting the Bay Area as part of a tour to raise money for the progressive fund, before he headed to Seattle for the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.
Several conflicts undermining religious pluralism have sprung up since the elections, he said, citing such examples as attacks on the freedom to drive on one of Jerusalem’s main roads on Shabbat, women’s freedom to wear the clothing of their choice at supermarkets and a comedian’s right to satirize the weekly Torah portion on public television.
Due largely to recent electoral reform in Israel, National Religious Party, Shas and United Torah Judaism now hold 23 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. They help the Likud coalition maintain a Knesset majority, and thus exercise more influence than their numbers might suggest.
Acknowledging that Israel’s secular population “literally does nothing” to maintain its rights, Armoni said Mate Chofesh is trying to show that the “silent majority does have a voice.”
Mate Chofesh includes representatives of the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and secular humanist movements; of the Labor, Likud, Meretz and Tsomet political parties; of feminist, civil rights, kibbutz, immigrant and archaeologist organizations; and of grassroots groups such as the “Pub-goers of Jerusalem.”
Strategies include organizing demonstrations, running newspaper ads, lobbying government officials, building public awareness and bringing cases to the Supreme Court.
Armoni hopes such efforts may awaken the secular populace.
“We may be entering a stage in which the pluralistic public in Israel recognizes the need to fight,” he said.
The issues that will rouse Israel’s sleeping giant won’t be the rights of Reform and Conservative Jews, he said, even though American Jews see this as a primary concern.
“Reform and Conservative are still seen as something very marginal,” he said.
But if the issue is framed as opposition to the monopoly of Orthodoxy over life-cycle ceremonies and civil freedoms, he said, secular Jews may rally for change.
According to Armoni, the most prominent incidents since the spring include:
*Jerusalem’s Bar Ilan Street. The road has become a weekly demonstration site between those who want it closed to traffic on Shabbat and those who believe this main traffic artery must remain open.
*”Immodestly” dressed women. Female workers at the Education Ministry, which is near the ultrareligious Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem, have been physically and verbally attacked for wearing pants or short skirts.
*Supersol. A Jerusalem store in this major grocery store chain has required women wearing pants or short skirts to cover themselves with black shawls available at the store’s entrance.
*Conversion laws. Legislation, proposed by the Orthodox, would limit conversions to only those approved by Israel’s Orthodox chief rabbinate. This would reverse a 1995 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to Reform and Conservative conversions.
*Channel 1. Offended by the public channel’s airing of comedian Gil Kopatch’s satirical twist on the weekly Torah portion, Orthodox political parties are calling for the channel’s privatization.
*Archaeology. A proposed amendment to the penal code would sentence anyone who damages a grave — even during a legal archaeological dig — to up to three years in prison.
“This is the end of archaeology in Israel,” Armoni said.
Although some issues grab more attention than others, Armoni said they must all be viewed as equally serious and symbolic of a trend.
“We believe you cannot and should not isolate one element from the overall struggle,” he said.