Rabbi Elimelech Meisels, who runs four religious seminaries in Israel for young Orthodox women, is being sued for sexual assault and fraud.\n
Israeli women between the ages of 20 and 33 will be eligible to receive government-funded abortions in 2014.
Recently, I went to a Women of the Wall service for Rosh Chodesh Av. It was my first time at one of their services, and I thought I was prepared for the ugliness I would see on the other side. I wasn’t.
For the first time in Israel’s history, three of the major parties are headed by women. The Labor party headed by Shelly Yacimovich is expected to become Israel’s second-largest party, Hatnuah headed by former Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni is set to win seven seats, and the dovish Meretz and Zahava Gal-On is projected at five seats in the 120-seat parliament.
Six women were detained by Jerusalem police for wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall as more than 100 women gathered there for the monthly Women of the Wall service.
The religious women\’s organization Kolech filed a class-action lawsuit against a haredi Orthodox radio station for excluding women.
Fearing costly vandalism aimed at buses carrying advertisements that include images of women; to avoid legal issues of discrimination if only images of men appear; and to side-step head-on collisions with Jerusalem\’s ultra-Orthodox community; Egged, Israel\’s public bus cooperative has ordered the company handling its on-bus advertising to stop running ads with pictures or representations of either men or women. As of August 1, a \”faceless\” policy was put into effect.
Charedi Orthodox men in Israel are buying glasses that will prevent them from seeing the immodest women that threaten their way of life.
In 1979, I moved from the United States to Israel, where I discovered that unlike in America, reproductive choice in Israel was by and large not an issue — not religiously, politically or socially.
Israel\’s Chief Rabbinical Council ruled that woman can deliver eulogies at funerals, but that it is up to the community rabbi to decide on a case-by-case basis.
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