The Yerushalmim Movement, an organization promoting pluralism in the capital,
will initiate an advertising campaign on Jerusalem buses featuring women who
represent the group, it was announced on Wednesday.
The Yerushalmim
Movement petitioned the High Court of Justice court last year against Egged and
Canaan, the company that handles advertising on Egged buses, after the two
companies rejected an advertising campaign of Yerushalmim because it featured
women.
Sectors of the ultra-Orthodox community object to advertisements
bearing images of women for reasons of modesty.
Canaan and Egged claimed
that they would incur financial damage if they used such advertisements and also
said that buses displaying them were frequently vandalized.
In response
last month to the High Court petition, the State Attorney’s Office and the
Transportation Ministry said, however, that no reports of vandalism had been
made in recent years.
According to Yerushalmim, advertisements with women
have not appeared on Egged buses in Jerusalem for at least eight
years.
The ministry wrote in response to the petition that public
transportation license holders such as Egged would not be allowed to
discriminate on the basis of gender or any other factor when providing
advertising on buses.
Canaan said in a statement to the media on
Wednesday that “despite the concern regarding vandalism, which has been directed
in the past toward buses with these kind of advertisements, we decided to accede
to Yerushalmim’s request, in the hope that all sides will treat one another with
tolerance and sensitivity.”
The company stood by its claim that the
“vandalism of extremists in the city” had in the past caused it and its
advertisers heavy “financial damage.”
Rabbi Uri Ayalon, director of the
Yerushalmim Movement, said that “an atmosphere of equality between men and women
is a crucial and basic value” for a democratic state and its capital.
“As
a Jerusalem resident with two daughters, I, and everyone who wants a pluralistic
Jerusalem, believe that the value of equality is nonnegotiable,” he
said.
“For someone to decide that women are merely sexual objects is
offensive and I don’t want to raise my daughters in such a city,” he
continued.
“Jerusalem is a city with people of all backgrounds and
everyone has the right to live as they wish, so it is crucial to fight this
phenomenon,” Ayalon said.
Yerushalmim’s new advertising campaign, the
same one rejected in 2011 by Canaan and Egged, features women from the
organization under the slogan “Yerushalmiyot [women of Jerusalem], nice to meet
you – because Jerusalem belongs to all of us.”
The advertisements will go
up in the coming days.