Published: 18 July 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
ANAT HOFFMAN is one of the founders and the longstanding chairperson of Women of the Wall. She shares her secrets for resilience with Israel's protest movement.
Women of the Wall (WOW) was founded in 1988 to secure the rights of women to pray at the Kotel, in a fashion that includes singing, reading aloud from the Torah and wearing religious garments.
Lately, I've been asked to share the secret of the WOW’s resilience with the growing protest movement in Israel. Turning to us makes sense. Women of the Wall’s struggle for religious pluralism, gender equality and tolerance has lasted 34 years, as one of the veteran social change organisations in Israel.
What are the pillars of our resilience? The first is community.
We are a praying congregation, a close network of sisters who care deeply about each other and who successfully broke through internal partitions and divisions. Some of us are Orthodox, some Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist, but we focus on our collective goal and ignore the rest. We act as one, including Women of the Wall from around the world - Brazil, Australia and even Alaska.
We also extend a warm embrace to the men who support us and have become “honorary women of the Wall”. We take care of each other, genuinely interested in supporting group prayer by carrying an extra bottle of water, or an umbrella, or an extra sweater in case our sisters need one.
Protesters in Israel can learn from us to ignore smaller differences between the multitude of organisations that make up the protests and focus on the mutual goal. They can also learn from us how to be a community. For example, offer a ride to people from your neighbourhood, ensure they come every week, again and again, to join the protests.
Women of the Wall celebrate the tiniest movement forward in a big way. We have broken our main strategic goal into many small steps that allow us to congratulate ourselves constantly for every infinitesimal movement forward. The protesters in Israel should reward themselves for slowing down the aggressive onslaught of dangerous legislation; they should be celebrating their own mere existence. This protest has historic proportions. Its tenaciousness is hard evidence of victory over indifference, which alone is cause for celebration.
