Video Clip of “Women of the Wall” – Fighting for right to pray freely at holiest site in Judaism

Per Anat Hoffman this morning to me:

“John – The prayer service was the culmination of an exhausting few days, yet we were reinvigorated by the good energy brought by the participants who were so thrilled to be at the Wall with WOW.  Many had never experienced a women's prayer service like this before.

We pulled off the Birkat Kohanot to the degree that was “permitted” by the police and the Israeli government. The movie points out how absurd were the restrictions placed on WOW. This is what we need to show the world.

Please watch … Scroll down a bit until you see the box with the arrow: https://www.facebook.com/womenofthewall.

As ever,

Anat

Note about Leonard Nimoy's belief in the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish state

I had helped facilitate the gift by the Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy (z”l) Estate to support this Women of the Wall event at the holiest site in Judaism. Susan is my first cousin (her father and my mother were brother and sister) and Leonard was very dear to me and my family. He would have been proud to have helped this noble and important cause.

Leonard cared deeply about the people and State of Israel and about its democratic tradition. He shared with me that when he played Golda Meir's husband, Morris Meyerson, in the 1982 film “A Woman Called Golda” opposite Ingrid Bergman as Golda, for which he received an Emmy nomination, it was one of the most important and moving roles in his career. They filmed the scene of dancing in the streets immediately after David ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in May, 1948 on the very day that President Anwar Sadat arrived in Israel to speak to the Knesset. Leonard believed in Israel, was proud of its achievements and its democracy, and he frequently bemoaned to me the growing right-wing fanatic nationalism and ultra-Orthodoxy that he witnessed taking over the spirit and soul of a growing number of Israelis and American Jews.

I am grateful to Susan for honoring Leonard's memory in this manner. He would most certainly have emphasized to the Jewish people “Live long and prosper!”