jerusalem | A secluded section of the Western Wall set aside for women’s and mixed prayer services was officially inaugurated Tuesday, Aug. 17.
The site, located on a section of the Wall next to Robinson’s Arch, now home to an archaeological garden, will be used for periodic all-women’s prayer services conducted by the Women at the Wall group, as well as for irregular mixed services carried out by Israel’s Masorti or Conservative movement. The movement has been using the site unofficially for the past five years.
The area’s separate entrance will separate the group from direct contact with haredim who frequent the wall, and who are vehemently opposed to women’s public prayer.
The site was constructed in response to a watershed Israeli Supreme Court ruling last year barring the Women of the Wall group from publicly worshipping at the Western Wall.
Israel’s highest court ruled 5-4 that the government had to assign a nearby alternative site for such prayer within a year or allow women to pray at the Wall.
At the new site, women will be able to worship at a secluded side section of the Wall while wearing prayer shawls and reading from the Torah, worship that has provoked anger and violence from fervently religious worshippers in the past.
The Tuesday inauguration of the site — which was ignored by the haredi-run municipality — was welcomed by the Masorti movement. The group has been conducting periodic mixed prayer services at the site, which met with intense disappointment by the Women of the Wall, which views it as a discriminatory move.
“The government of Israel spent millions of shekels to put us in a second-class section of the wall,” said the head of the Women of the Wall, Anat Hoffman, whose group held Torah-reading services at the site Wednesday, Aug. 18, marking the new Jewish month according to the Hebrew calendar, but carried out the rest of the service in the Western Wall plaza area.
Calling the decision to place her group at the secluded site “separate and unequal,” Hoffman noted that every time the group wants to organize a prayer event at the site, it needs to apply for permission to do so from the company that built it, and must ensure it does not need to pay the normal admission fee to enter the compound.
The director of Israel’s Masorti movement, Rabbi Ehud Bandel, called the development “an important step toward the equality of the streams of Judaism in Israel.”
In a nod to the Women of the Wall, the movement head added that the group does not cede the right of other groups to pray as they see fit at the Western Wall.
The new prayer site is accessible via the archaeological garden to the right of the Western Wall plaza and will accommodate about 40 worshippers.
While construction of the new site for mixed and women’s-only prayer was under way, the haredi rabbi of the Western Wall carried out a controversial construction project at the Wall, which has extended the segregated prayer area at the expense of the plaza — used for various private and public ceremonies — and has heightened the barrier that closes off the prayer area in the plaza.
Neither the Masorti movement nor the Reform movement succeeded in stopping the work.