Putting women’s rights at the forefront

A 15-year-old Beit Shemesh resident has earned the right for everyone to ride the bus without fear.

By SAM SOKOL
Superbus (photo credit: Sam Sokol)
Superbus
(photo credit: Sam Sokol)
Last September, 15-year-old high school student Ariella Marsden boarded a local bus in Beit Shemesh with a couple of friends on the way home from school. There were plenty of seats, and the girls found three together in the front. Soon, a pair of haredi (ultra- Orthodox) men entered the bus and, ignoring seats to the back, hovered over Marsden and her friends. After several stops, as the bus slowly filled, the driver turned around and instructed the girls to go to the back and give up their seats to the two men.
Scared of being kicked off the bus, she and her friends complied. While they had sat in the front, the bus had filled, and they were forced to stand in the back for the remainder of their journey home.
Nobody yelled at Marsden or threatened violence, but she was intimidated nonetheless. The driver, she says, “was just quite big... and he was an adult and we were just little girls.” And nobody, on the entire bus, stood up for her or reacted in any way.
When she returned home, she told her mother, Dawn, an Anglo immigrant, what had occurred. Dawn decided to sue Superbus, the company that runs the local bus service in Beit Shemesh, and was awarded NIS 13,000 in damages earlier this month for the discrimination.
The Marsdens live on Gad Street in the quiet residential neighborhood of Sheinfeld. Her neighborhood rose to national prominence last year when haredi extremists held daily protests against the opening of the local national- religious girls’ school Orot Banot. In fact, Ariella’s 12-year-old sister Leora has just graduated from Orot and was an eyewitness of the yelling and spitting of her city’s extremists.
For Dawn, Ariella’s anguish over the discrimination, on top of the stress of dealing with a daughter who had to run a daily gauntlet just to attend elementary school, proved too much to bear in silence.
“The incident [on the bus] happened at the beginning of the school year last year, and Leora was in Orot Banot and she was having to go to school every day with the haredim making all the trouble down there, and all of a sudden, one day Ariella comes home, and she was very clearly upset about what had happened, and I just got really annoyed,” says Dawn, who, like most of her neighborhood’s residents, is national religious. “I thought to myself, I didn’t come on aliya to bring my children up, my girls especially, in this environment, and I just decided that I had to do something about it.”
What she did was contact attorney Orly Erez-Lahovski of the Israel Religious Action Center, the advocacy branch of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism. IRAC represents the interests of the Reform Movement in Israel and is involved in litigation to promote pluralism and religious tolerance for the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism.
Erez-Lahovski advised the Marsdens on how to go about suing Superbus and the driver – who, ironically, was not haredi himself, but Arab.
The Marsdens have been the victims of intimidation before. Their neighborhood lies on the fault line between the overwhelmingly English-speaking, national-religious neighborhood of Sheinfeld and the insular hassidic enclave of Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet. Her house is only meters away from Herzog Street, which forms the boundary between the two neighborhoods.
When her apartment complex was first built, she says, “the new house owners received letters from some of the haredi neighbors... saying that if they didn’t get rid of their televisions, the writers of the letters could not guarantee the safety of the new owners’ property.”
While she herself has not been subject to harassment, she says that her female neighbors have been subject to abuse while jogging on the nationalreligious side of the street. Such incidents are familiar to many in the community, and one enterprising teenager has even created a business selling pepper spray to residents for self-defense.
Beit Shemesh has been back in the news in recent weeks due to the reappearance of signs in the Kirya Haredit neighborhood calling for women not to walk on the same side of the street as a synagogue housing a study hall.
Though authorities have taken down the signs multiple times, local haredi activists have come back and erected them on the same site, claiming that it is their right to do so within their neighborhood.
However, critics charge that public streets belong to everybody in the community and that the haredim do not have the right to determine who uses streets paid for by all taxpayers.
Meanwhile, giant signs calling for Jewish girls to dress modestly loom on every building in the haredi areas, including the more liberal and American haredi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef.
Residents angry at the city’s haredi mayor, Rabbi Moshe Abutbol of Shas, recently covered up one of those signs in Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef’s shopping center with a banner calling for his ouster, but it was quickly taken down.
Dawn did not want her daughter to have to tolerate further abuse, and filed suit almost immediately after the incident on the bus occurred.
“The incident was on September 22, 2011, and the court case itself was on July 1, [and] we had to wait nine days for a verdict,” she says.
The wait was worth it, and on the ninth day the Marsdens received their compensation. But they stress that they did not sue either for the money or to attack the haredim.
“I want to emphasize that the lawsuit that we brought was not an anti-haredi act,” Dawn says. “It was based on the idea that my daughter, as well as everybody else’s daughters in Beit Shemesh, [should be able to] catch a bus outside school and take a ride home without being harassed by the driver or anybody else.”
However, a Superbus spokesman objected to the Marsdens’ allegations, saying that there would not be a change in company policy, as the company’s policy has always been to comply with the law and prevent discrimination.
According to Superbus, it was not Ariella whom the driver asked to move, but the haredim who took the girls’ seats. The driver, his employers assert, did not even see what had happened and was not aware of it until he was brought to court.
Both Ariella and her mother, meanwhile, make a point of differentiating between extremists and other haredim, emphasizing that many haredi women work as teachers at Orot Banot and that there are “some wonderful people” in the haredi community. In fact, notes Dawn, most of the faculty at Orot “found themselves in a very difficult position last year where they were living between teaching in the school and living in the haredi community. That’s very hard.”
WHILE THE Marsdens only sued for the one incident, it was not the only one that occurred. A week after the events enumerated in the lawsuit, Ariella again found herself on a local Superbus line, this time with her 17- year-old brother.
“He sat next to me, and then a ticket inspector came and told him to move to the front,” she recounts. “He said to my brother that this is a mehadrin [gender-separate] bus, and then my brother said no, it’s not, there is no such thing. Then the ticket inspector turns around and goes.”
The High Court of Justice has declared mehadrin bus lines illegal.
While men and women are allowed to segregate themselves voluntarily, any compulsion to do so is strictly against the law.
On many Beit Shemesh buses that pass through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, the sight of women sitting in the back is common and, to longtime residents, no longer remarkable, even though it shocks out-of-towners.
Asked if she feels nervous about riding the bus after both of these incidents, Ariella replies that she is not afraid in the slightest.
“Me and my friends, we just sit in the front, and we have decided that we have a right,” she says, “and if they ask us to move, we will tell them that they can’t [ask this of us].”
Dawn interjects that the lawsuit “definitely empowered Ariella and let her know what her rights are, and I think that’s a really good thing.”
The court case, Dawn believes, will make a difference because it will help keep the issue of gender segregation in the public eye and because it has let drivers know that they are accountable for their actions.
“Our lawsuit was not just against Superbus themselves, it was also specifically against the driver, and the judge also found against him,” she explains.
“Now that they know that they can also be sued, [the bus drivers] are less likely to get involved in something and less likely to do this again, because it means that they [are liable] as well.”
However, she declines to be photographed for this article, stating that “we are not looking for publicity, and we are not looking for the attention. I never want to give somebody the option to turn around and say, ‘Oh, they are just looking to be famous.’” The community has been supportive of the Marsdens, although Dawn admits that many were skeptical that the lawsuit would yield any tangible results.
“When I announced on Facebook that we were going to sue, people were very supportive and encouraged us to do so, but on the same note, I don’t think that people quite had the expectations that the suit would end up with the verdict and the compensation that it did,” she says.
The importance of this issue, she adds, is not connected to her or her daughter and must be discussed without being tied to any specific individual.
She believes activism, both political and judicial, is important in combating extremism.
“I personally feel that for a long time, the extremist elements in the haredi community have worked under the tactics of intimidation, and I think that if we stand up to them and we say we are not going to be intimidated, we are going to take action, then they are going to see that things aren’t going to go their way all the time,” she says.
Rabbi Dov Lipman, a local activist who organized protests against the harassment of the Orot Banot pupils, agrees.
“We have learned that the best thing we can do, as a community, is to combat extremism in every size, shape or form,” he notes. “Even if we cannot see the immediate result, we know that doing so helps with the overall cause.”
According to Lipman, “in this specific scenario, there is no question that bus companies will instruct their drivers to enforce the law and defend the rights of female passengers rather than face the prospect of a lawsuit, so the immediate gain can be seen.”
Nonetheless, many residents of Beit Shemesh believe that real change will not come until there is a change in the attitudes of many of the city’s rabbinic leaders.
During the controversy over the violence against Orot Banot girls, local residents protested the rabbinic leadership’s silence. Locals have stated that their rabbis have issued thunderous denunciations of radicalism within their synagogues, but many of them have declined to sign petitions calling on religious leaders to condemn the protesters publicly.
Last year, Rabbi Natan Slifkin, a local author and blogger, told In Jerusalem that “at the various rallies held in support of Orot over the last few months, barely any haredim were present. And a letter of support signed by 14 local rabbis included only rabbis on the edge of haredi society; more mainstream haredi rabbis refused to cosign it. I don’t believe for a moment that they support the violence, but they are not willing to openly protest it.”
There has been a more vigorous police response to violent incidents following the national outrage and mass protests that the Orot Banot affair engendered, and many residents are still waiting to see a similar change in the actions of the city’s rabbis. In the meantime, however, they continue doing what they can to prevent extremists from harassing the many citizens – haredi, national-religious and secular – who just want to live their lives in peace.