Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of the Women of the Wall activist group, was arrested
Tuesday night for disturbing the peace by singing out loud at the Western
Wall.
Hoffman, along with 250 women from the movement and from the
Hadassah organization went to the site for a prayer service for the new Jewish
month of Heshvan.
She was held overnight and released after 12 hours in
police custody, and issued with a restraining order banning her from visiting
the Western Wall for 30 days.
Two more women, Lesley Sachs, director of
Women of the Wall and board member Rachel Cohen-Yeshurun, were arrested
Wednesday morning at another women’s prayer service.
They were detained
and questioned for several hours and subsequently released.
“It was
awful,” Hoffman told The Forward. “In the past when I was detained I had to have
a policewoman come with me to the bathroom, but this was something
different.
This time they checked me naked, completely, without my
underwear. They dragged me on the floor 15 meters; my arms are bruised. They put
me in a cell without a bed, with three other prisoners, including a prostitute
and a car thief.
They threw the food through a little window in the door.
I laid on the floor covered with my tallit.
“I’m a tough cookie, but I
was just so miserable. And for what? I was with the Hadassah women saying Sh’ma
Yisrael.”
In a press statement, the group said that it remains “committed
to their struggle to gain the right of all women to pray at the Kotel, each
according to her own custom, with Torah, tallit and voices raised in
song.”
Israeli law, upheld by the Supreme Court, stipulates that it is
forbidden to conduct a religious ceremony “contrary to accepted practice” at a
holy site, or one that may “hurt the feelings of other
worshipers.”
Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report