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CONSERVATIVE RABBIS PROTEST EXPANSION
OF WESTERN WALL PRAYER SPACE
by Etgar Lefkovits
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 10, 2004
A group of 100 visiting Conservative rabbis held a vigil at the Western Wall plaza Tuesday, protesting against the project to expand the segregated prayer area into the plaza.
The construction project, which was initiated by the Western Wall Rabbi, will extend the prayer area adjacent to the Wall by about 600 square meters (approximately 6,500 square feet), at the expense of the plaza area, which is used for various private and public ceremonies.
In keeping with Orthodox tradition, men and women are segregated at the prayer area, while in the plaza, often used for IDF and other state ceremonies as well as by non-Orthodox groups, is not.
"The Western Wall, a national site which belongs to all the Jewish people, is fast becoming an Orthodox synagogue," said the head of the Masorti (Conservative) Movement in Israel, Rabbi Ehud Bandel.
Bandel said that the Conservative movement was weighing a possible petition to the High Court of Justice to stop the project, noting that Tuesday's visit by the foreign rabbis was intended to garner international financial support for a legal battle.
During the two-minute protest, an attempt by several members of the group of male and female rabbis – in Israel for the 104th annual Conservative Rabbis Convention – to unfurl a banner which read "The Wall belongs to us all," was thwarted by police who immediately confiscated the banner.
Organizers conceded that they did not have a police permit for a demonstration, but called their action a "symbolic silent and respectful" protest against the "scandalous" project.
Aside from the bewildered stares of an Arab tractor driver at work in the area, the group did not attract the attention of passersby, in part because at the time of their visit – after morning prayers – the Wall plaza was relatively empty, and in part because the women did not don the tallitot and tefillin that they wore earlier at a mixed prayer session at Robinson's Arch.
Nevertheless, bracing for possible trouble, police subsequently briefly detained one group member, Argentinean-born Rabbi Baruch Zelicovich of Fort Worth, Texas, for allegedly assaulting a police officer who was trying to remove him from the scene.
The rabbi denied the allegations outright, and was released several minutes later.
Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, who initiated the construction, has said that the existing prayer area was too small, and that the expansion was "insignificant" and would not adversely affect non-Orthodox groups.
In a last-ditch effort to reach an out-of-court compromise, the heads of the Masorti movement are scheduled to meet with Rabinovitch next week.
In the meantime, two months after the movement first publicized its opposition to the construction project, and sent a series of letters to government officials bemoaning the move, the work nears completion.
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