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LACK OF CASH FOILS WESTERN WALL PETITION
by Etgar Lefkovits
Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2004
Financial difficulties are keeping the Masorti (Conservative) Movement from filing a petition to the High Court of Justice against a controversial construction project under way at the Western Wall plaza to expand the segregated prayer space, movement head Rabbi Ehud Bandel said Tuesday.
The project, initiated last year by Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, will extend the prayer area by about 600 square meters, at the expense of the plaza, 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 state ceremonies as well as by non-Orthodox groups, the genders intermingle freely.
Three months after first launching a protest against the move, and following a fruitless meeting with Rabinovitch last month, Bandel said Tuesday that his group has "given up" on further negotiations, but has not filed a petition to the High Court to stop the work due to "financial problems."
A world meeting of Conservative Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem last month failed to raise sufficient funds for the legal fight, Bandel said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he is on a fund-raising tour.
Rabinovitch says the existing prayer space is too small and the "insignificant" expansion would not adversely affect non-Orthodox groups.
The expansion is to be completed in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, construction work on an adjacent section of the Wall which will serve as a new site for women's and mixed prayer services is running three months late, a spokesman for the construction company said Tuesday.
Faced with a looming April 6 deadline set by the High Court of Justice last year, workers are preparing the groundwork for the site at a section of the Wall next to Robinson's Arch, now home to an archeological garden.
But the NIS 2 million project, which was expected to be completed by next month, will not be ready for another two to three months, said Moshe Bagaon, a spokesman for the East Jerusalem Development Company, which is charged with building the site.
The new prayer site, which will be accessible via the archeological garden to the right of the Western Wall plaza, will have enough room for about 40 women worshipers and will be wheelchair-accessible.
In a watershed ruling last year, the High Court barred the Women of the Wall group from publicly worshiping at the Western Wall, but ruled 5-4 that the government had to assign a nearby alternative site for such prayer within a year.
At the new site, women will be able to worship at a section of the Wall while wearing prayer shawls and reading from the Torah, behavior that provoked anger and violence from Orthodox worshipers at the women's section of the Wall.
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