* Israel - Single Sex Buses: Ultra-Orthodox Power?
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, among the approximately 800,000 in Israel
BEIT SHEMESH,Israel -The New York Times, By STEVEN ERLANGER -November 2, 2007: -- When Larry Pinczower switches on his cellphone, the seal of a rabbinate council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life... The Egged bus company has special routes for the ultra-Orthodox, so that men and women are segregated, sometimes in separate buses. But there have been riots in Ramat Beit Shemesh B over certain bus routes, with graffiti comparing the company and the police to Nazis and calling Israel “the regime of the apostates,” rejecting the government as nonreligious... On Oct. 21, five ultra-Orthodox Jews assaulted a woman and an Israeli soldier on a bus bound for Beit Shemesh. The men demanded that the woman sit in the back of the bus; when she refused and asked the soldier to sit next to her, they beat them both. When the police came, dozens of ultra-Orthodox men attacked them while the assailants escaped... Some ultra-Orthodox communities have set up private bus companies, which separate the genders...
* COMMENT by Rebecca Honig Friedman : - )
... but on the other hand, as the NYT article points out, this issue isn’t about the common haredi men relinquishing power. It’s about haredi rabbinic leaders. The power of the ultra-Orthodox buying block lies not in what the people want but in what their leaders tell them they can want... (See this illustrative anecdote about a pizza store in Beit Shemesh - /http://jewess.canonist.com/?p=669A)
Labels: women buses
posted by Unknown @ 3:31 PM
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