Divided we pray

Myriam Tangi spent more than a decade of her life tracking separations between men and women in the Jewish liturgical and public space.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Jews praying (photo credit: Courtesy)
Jews praying
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The thin, elegant woman who stood on repeated occasions near the women praying at the Western Wall – those who insisted on wearing a tallit and those who tried to prevent them from doing so – didn’t attract much attention at the time. She was one of many photographers trying to catch moments of spiritual elevation or outrage there.
Years later, however, it came out that Myriam Tangi – a poet, photographer and painter – was searching for something broader and deeper than the clashes between haredi women and members of Women of the Wall.
Tangi spent more than a decade of her life tracking separations – fences, walls, curtains and any other form of visual separation between men and women in the Jewish liturgical and public space. In Israel, France, America and in her native Morocco, Tangi tried to comprehend what it means to stand on one side of a separation imposed by centuries-old traditions.
Tools of her quest include her deep knowledge of Jewish traditions and sacred texts, and her camera.
Her years of observation and documentation culminated recently in a magnificent Gefen Publishing House hardcover book titled Mechitza Seen by Women. Its beautiful photographs reflect years of research in a range of Jewish communities and public spaces, wherever men and women could be found with a separation in between them – the mehitza. In addition to the photos and her own introduction, Tangi brings us the musings of contemporary thinkers, men and women from all streams of Judaism, pondering the meaning, purpose and value of gender separation throughout history and today.
Tangi stresses that she does not judge.
At no point does she denounce separation customs, even when she shares her visual reflections on the gender-separated buses in Jerusalem she saw a few years ago in the haredi sector.
“Women have been traditionally confined behind curtains, claustras or translucent screens or looking down on the liturgical space from a balcony; women have had only indirect access to the ritual,” she says over a cup of tea in a coffee shop in the Baka neighborhood, during a recent visit in Jerusalem, where her two daughters have chosen to live.
Tangi divides her life between Paris, Jerusalem, the US and Morocco, where she was born, and where the Rabat Jewish Museum is presenting an exhibition of her photos that she will launch next week.
“The photos show women peering from behind a veil, a panel of wood or glass, from a balcony – from the places reserved for women in synagogues or meeting places,” she notes. Tangi adds that it was important to accompany her book’s photos with reflections on the topic from Jewish writers, such as sociologist Prof. Shmuel Trigano (France), on the meaning of separation in Judaism; the “archeology of the word mehitza” by writer Marc-Alain Oaknine; Carol Levithan’s American Conservative rabbinical thoughts about the separation being a custom and not a law; the halachic aspects of the mehitza by Rabbanit Michal Tikochinsky from Israel; and an essay by Canadian Dr. Sonia Sarah Lipsyc on the place of women in modern Orthodox synagogues.
Tangi compares the different types of dividers, from the thin lace veil used in the past in Sephardi communities to the near-total separation practiced by Ashkenazi communities, exemplified by the thick wall with only one tiny window in the Maharal synagogue in Prague. She suggests that some of the reasons for the physical differences may go beyond the theological realm to aspects of traditional male domination.
“The place of separation in the Jewish world, the meaning of the separation and the need for it,” says Tangi, is at the heart of her intellectual and artistic pursuit during these past 10 years. The book, she says, “expresses well that inquiry and the quest for an explanation, if not an answer.”
She hopes her work will serve as a platform for dialogue between men and women “to exchange understandings about the very notion of separation and about the place of this separation in the synagogue, in the past and today.”
Asked why a need for separation between the genders during spiritual moments such as prayer is still considered to be crucial among many Jewish communities worldwide, Tangi suggests there is something to the assertion that in such a solemn moment, there should be no interference – including the close presence of a person from another gender.
However, she concedes that a corollary question is why, if at all, someone engaged in such a solemn moment should care who is standing or sitting near him.
Mechitza is not only a book, it is also a worldwide traveling exhibition. More details can be found at Tangi’s website: www.myriamtangi.com