I expect you have read the shocking account of the goings-on in Beit Shemesh:
The end of the school day at the Orot Girl’s Elementary ought to be an oasis of peace in the family day – a chance for mothers and daughters to chat over teachers and lessons and who-said-what-to-whom.
But from the beginning of the current term a grim and disturbing drama has been played out instead in the busy street outside the school gates in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh.
As the children and their mothers make their way home, intimidating pickets of ultra-orthodox Jewish men have been waiting for them a little way up the street – some, say the families, have thrown stones and tomatoes and faeces as they have tried to pass.
At the peak of the protests the scenes were shocking and intimidating, with a baying cacophony of shouted insults reaching a climax as the small family groups tried to find a way along the pavement.
The ultra-orthodox protesters – all men – are a striking sight. Bearded and with their hair in long, wispy ringlets they are dressed in long overcoats and black, broad-brimmed Homburg hats.
It is a traditional costume with its roots deep in the past, but the insults the men shout are about how they think their neighbours should be living now, in modern Israel.
There are taunts about sluttishness and immorality – and cries that the girls are “defiling the neighbourhood”. These are, unbelievably, references to how girls aged between six and 12 are dressed to attend a religious elementary school.
It is surely, you think, the stuff of nightmares for the children – a thought that troubles mothers like Hadassah Margoleese, whose eight-year-old daughter Naama is one of the children running this gauntlet of anger and intolerance.
“These are little girls who are being abused every day and then they end up at night with nightmares,” she says.
There is a long report as well as pictures at Ynet:
Senior Beit Shemesh rabbis took part in the rally, in which participants called for “maintaining the purity of the haredi neighborhoods against strangers plotting to desecrate them, backed by the evil regime.”
In spite of the organizers’ hopes that the protest would be attended by all haredi factions in Beit Shemesh, the only ones who arrived were the “extremists” identified with the struggle, as well as dozens of haredi children
The Yeshiva World – which is chastised in its Wikipedia entry because it “will not post any stories which portray Orthodox Judaism in a bad light” – certainly does not hold back in expressing its views on these rioters:
Unfortunately, the girls attending the Orot Girl’s School in Beit Shemesh are not having an easy time due to the determination of area hoodlums, who insist they represent the chareidi community. The opening of the school year was under a veil of threats, accompanied by a significant police presence, with Beit Shemesh Mayor Moshe Abutbul trying to play the middle road, but favoring the chareidi claims to the building.
In the latest round of violence, hundreds of chareidim protested on Tuesday night outside the school, insisting it has no place on the border of the chareidi community. This despite the fact that the school is frum, and the girls are modestly dressed, from Shomer Shabbos homes, simply not chareidi [enough].
There have been other odd goings on in Beit Shemesh, involving a possible outlawing of an extreme and cultish Haredi group, nicknamed the Taliban Sect. I wonder if this is connected.
