Due to the close proximity of the prime minister’s official residence and his private home, some five minutes’ walk away, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, whose tent is around the corner from the official residence of the PM, holds demonstrations every week in France Square and on Aza Road. At the Friday demonstrations, there is sometimes an empty Shabbat table with yellow chairs bearing the portraits of hostages who are missing from the Shabbat tables of their families. It is heartbreaking to see their faces and to hear how agonizingly anxious their families are for their return and how much they grieve over their absence.
“There’s no Friday night. No Shabbat. We’re stuck in the seventh of October,” said Hagai Angrest, whose soldier son Matan was taken hostage on Oct. 7, after being brutally beaten by Hamas terrorists. Hamas released video footage of how Matan was captured, and the Angrest family subsequently made it public so the world could see the cruelty of Hamas.
Religious squabbles
■ DURING COVID and for some time afterward, synagogues throughout the country held outdoor services. In Tel Aviv in 2023, there was a clash between Orthodox and secular residents over seating at High Holy Day services in Dizengoff Square. The Orthodox organizers wanted segregated seating, and the secular congregants wanted mixed seating. The matter could have been settled without any ill feeling by sectioning off the seating into men, women, and mixed. But that was too simple and led to further protests from secular residents over a religious takeover of public space.
Yediot Aharonot erroneously reported this week that there is a secret equal rights campaign being conducted by the Tel Aviv Municipality, in which synagogues standing on land owned by the municipality will have to vacate unless they sign an agreement to provide equal services to all, regardless of their gender or denomination.
The true story was that synagogues on land owned by the municipality were asked to sign a renewal contract, not an equality agreement.
Some of the synagogues involved are older than the state and were built with funds collected from the community.
There’s very little chance of an equality demand in Jerusalem because the majority of members of the Jerusalem City Council are ultra-Orthodox. Aside from that, why would secular Jews insist on going to an Orthodox synagogue when there are several Conservative and Reform synagogues in the city, where seating is mixed and women are called to the Torah? There are even Modern Orthodox synagogues where women are called to the Torah.
Admittedly, there are occasionally religious squabbles in Jerusalem, but on the whole it’s a live and let live situation, in which religious women who reside in outlying ultra-Orthodox areas voluntarily sit at the back of the bus, despite the efforts of their secular sisters to have them sit wherever there’s a vacant seat.
Regarding transportation, the question now remains: Where can people who have been deprived of their former parking spots on the street where they live, which have been canceled by the municipality in favor of bus stops, park their cars?
Another question arises: Given his plan to reduce the number of cars and increase bicycles throughout the city, will we soon see Mayor Moshe Lion riding a bike to work and to his various engagements?
Recognition for the Clal Building
■ THE CLAL Building, which has long been considered a white elephant and one of the city’s ugliest examples of modern architecture, is getting a different kind of recognition. It will be included in the Jerusalem pavilion of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which is due to open in South Korea in the last week of September.
Jerusalem is one of 18 participating cities from around the world that were chosen from among hundreds of applications. The Clal Building, which dates back to the 1970s, is included as an example of where Jerusalem is going from architectural, ecological, and social perspectives. In its time, the Clal building was considered among the most modern in the city. Jerusalem is now going through a major phase of urban renewal, and this will be reflected in the Jerusalem pavilion, which is a joint undertaking by the municipality, the Bezalel School of Architecture, and private and public architectural and engineering companies.
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