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WORK BEGINS ON MIXED PRAYER AREA NEAR WESTERN WALL
by Etgar Lefkovits
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 19, 2004
After a decade and a half of intense legal wrangling over the right of women to publicly pray at the Western Wall, construction work began this week at an adjacent section of the Wall which will serve as a new site for women's and mixed prayer services.
Faced with a looming April deadline set by the High Court of Justice last year, workers are preparing the groundwork for the site at an unpopulated extension of the Western Wall, next to Robinson's Arch, that is now home to an archeological garden.
The NIS 2 million project is expected to be completed by April in keeping with the court-imposed deadline, said Moshe Bagaon, a spokesman for the East Jerusalem Development Company, which is carrying out the work.
The site, which is accessible via the archeological garden to the right of the Western Wall plaza area, will have enough room for about 40 women worshipers, and will be wheelchair-accessible, Bagaon said.
In a watershed ruling last year, the High Court of Justice barred the Women of the Wall from publicly worshiping at the Western Wall, but ruled that the government had to assign a nearby alternative site for such prayer within a year.
In the 5-4 ruling, the court ordered the state to provide the women with facilities to pray at a site near – but not at – the traditional area of prayer at the Wall.
Women have always been allowed to pray at the Western Wall, but separately from men, and in private.
In the past, attempts by women to worship at the Wall, while wearing prayer shawls and reading from the Torah, have provoked anger and violence from Orthodox worshipers.
With an eye to the majority of worshipers and the tense reality on the ground, the court had accepted the government's position that allowing the group to pray at the plaza constituted a danger to public safety.
At the same time, the court ruled that if the government fails to prepare the site at Robinson's Arch as a proper prayer facility by April, it will be obliged to let the women pray at the Wall itself, despite the opposition of the Orthodox public.
The April 2003 ruling has been decried by the Women of the Wall as a discriminatory capitulation to violence.
"The fact that that the government is willing to spend NIS 2 million to build a ramp in an archeological garden just so we won't be able to share the wall is both outrageous and a colossal waste of money," said Anat Hoffman, a leader of the Women of the Wall, and a former Jerusalem city councilwoman.
At the same time, the site under construction is being praised by the head of the Masorti (Conservative) Movement in Israel, which views it as a major change in the decades-old status quo of Orthodox-only public prayer at the segregated site.
"The development of an alternative prayer site is a significant step for the advancement of religious pluralism in Israel," said Rabbi Ehud Bandel, the head of the movement in Israel.
The group has been holding small mixed prayer services at Robinson's Arch and nearby sites for the past three years.
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