Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Tomer Neuberg/Flash90
Public Yom Kippur prayers at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, Sept. 24, 2023
(JNS) — The Tel Aviv District Court held a preliminary hearing on Wednesday regarding a petition claiming anti-Jewish discrimination on the part of the Tel Aviv Municipality.
The petition, filed by the Rosh Yehudi organization and 14 Tel Aviv residents, claims that thousands of Muslims attended a gender-segregated religious event at the city’s Charles Clore Park on June 16, whereas the municipality had refused to grant a permit for a public gender-segregated Jewish religious event.
Rosh Yehudi has information on three separate gender-segregated Muslim prayer events this year on public grounds, Rosh Yehudi head Israel Zeira told JNS on Wednesday.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the municipality appeared to sidestep the accusation altogether, claiming that the petition was based solely on media reports regarding the Muslim events.
“The petitioner is basing itself on a journalistic publication whereas journalistic articles […] cannot form the basis for allegations brought before the court,” the municipality argued, referencing a High Court of Justice case from last year.
The municipality further argued that the reports, which it neither confirmed nor denied, were about events that had already happened and for which no permits had been issued, and therefore irrelevant to a petition concerning the city’s refusal to issue a permit for events that had not yet occurred.
However, the petition, filed last month, argues that allowing gender-segregated Islamic events to take place without a permit is also discriminatory, as it punishes those who seek permits and benefits those who do not.
“Just as nothing prevents a separate policy for Tel Aviv-Yafo’s Muslim minority, which has segregated events, so there should be no opposition in principle in our multicultural society for the practices of the Jewish-religious minority,” the petitioners wrote.
The municipality also argued on Wednesday that gender-segregated events on public grounds discriminated against women, but neither addressed the views of women, including women’s rights activists, who dispute this, nor explained why such segregation is discriminatory only toward women.
The municipality did not immediately reply to a JNS query on the matter.
Wednesday’s hearing follows a polarizing debate last year about gender-segregated prayer in Tel Aviv’s Dizengof Square. Highlighting coexistence issues between secular and religious Israeli Jews, the debate was sidelined by the outbreak of the Gaza war on Oct. 7, and is resurfacing ahead of this year’s Jewish holiday season.
Rosh Yehudi, whose mission statement speaks of strengthening Jewish identity, had held segregated prayer events at the square for years, with a permit, but last year the city decided to ban physical separation barriers from at such events. This year, the city didn’t respond to the organization’s request for a permit for three months, finally declining it outright last month.
The events of last year’s Yom Kippur prayer at Dizengof Square, which Rosh Yehudi held with a permit, shocked Jews and others across the world. Secular activists interrupted the event, tearing down Rosh Yehudi’s dividers — frames made of flexible materials to symbolically separate the sexes while respecting the municipality’s controversial ban on physical barriers. Some activists threw prayer books into the square’s fountain as they harassed and chased away Jews trying to pray on what many consider Judaism’s holiest day.
Tel Aviv is Israel’s second-largest city, with about 500,000 residents, including many thousands of religious and traditionalist Jews. Many of Tel Aviv’s residents celebrate its secularist identity and what they regard as its spirit of pluralism. These values, however, do not align with limiting the religious freedoms of residents who wish to gather and worship in accordance with their beliefs, the petitioners argued.
Judge Erez Yakuel instructed the parties to try to reach a compromise ahead of another discussion on Sept. 11. “I want you to imagine a square with everybody, worshipers and seculars, who use the whole space as they see fit within the confines of the law,” he told the parties.
But a representative of the municipality told the court: “Sex-segregated prayer cannot be allowed to take place in the city.” Harel Arnon, a lawyer representing Rosh Yehudi, told the judge that the group is prepared to move the event to any place designated for it by the municipality.
Irit Linur, a right-wing television pundit and columnist who is among the petitioners, called the municipality and its refusal to allow sex-segregated prayer in public “antisemitic.”
A secularist activist who attended the hearing, Moshe Peretz, told JNS that if sex-segregated prayer is allowed this year, he would take steps “that would make last year’s event pale in comparison to this one,” He added: “We have allowed Rosh Yehudi to grow and grow and we’re done. We will fight for our street and for our square.”
These threats, and the events of last year, “show that even if the city does compromise, antisemites will disrupt the event. So what are we even talking about here?” Linur said.
In its preliminary reply to the court ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, the municipality, unusually, waded into theology. It explained that, despite the predominant Jewish Orthodox custom, dividing the sexes in prayer outside a synagogue is not mandated by Jewish law.
The city also noted certain prohibitions and reservations by rabbinical rulers on prayer in open spaces, apparently to suggest that Rosh Yehudi’s Yom Kippur events violated Jewish principles as well as the city’s regulations, or constituted some misinterpretation of Jewish custom.
The city’s also noted that it does not limit gender-segregated prayer in synagogues and authorizes them as necessary to expand prayers onto public grounds when they get overcrowded.
Leading rabbinical authorities, including David Stav of the Tzohar rabbinical group and former chief Sephardic rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, have supported Rosh Yehudi’s event and defended it against attacks and legal obstacles.
Following the public outcry over last year’s events at Dizengoff Square, the Tel Aviv Municipality on Oct. 6 authorized Rosh Yehudi’s request to hold a Simchat Torah event at the square. This decision came after the High Court of Justice criticized the city’s actions and encouraged a compromise.
The municipality and Rosh Yehudi reached an agreement to hold the event on Oct. 7 without physical barriers separating men and women, with segregation being optional. Additionally, the organizers agreed to relocate the event from the central square to a nearby area. However, the event was canceled due to the devastating Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and ensuing war.
The compromise followed a High Court ruling on a petition by Rosh Yehudi, where the court stated that the city’s claim—asserting Rosh Yehudi had violated permit terms and thus could not hold a gender-segregated event — was not sufficient to justify restricting freedom of worship.
