Woman soldier flees in disguise after Haredi mob attack

Ultra-Orthodox men and boys attacked the woman at a Beit Shemesh bus station. EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON lifts the lid on an Israeli community so hardline that even social workers are scared to enter it.

Last week, a female soldier in uniform was attacked by a Haredi mob near an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Beit Shemesh, a city mid-way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Speaking on Israeli radio, obviously shaken even though her voice was disguised, the soldier, whose name has not been released, said she had been on her way to her base at the army's central officers' training camp and was changing busses when the attack occurred.

"As I was waiting for the bus, ultra-Orthodox men were threatening me and cursing me. When the bus came, they told the driver that they would set the bus on fire if he let me on."

She ran, and the crowd ran after her, growing larger as boys and adults came out of their houses and joined the fray. "Hundreds of children, teens and adults were running after me, yelling 'shikse' [a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman or girl] and throwing stones and cans at me. I felt helpless and surrounded."

She encountered three teenage girls, who hid her as the crowd tried to bang down their doors. She called the police, who came in unmarked cars, because, a spokesperson explained later, they did not want to be attacked and did not want to brand the family as "collaborators" with the authorities.  In the early hours of the morning, the family dressed her as an ultra-Orthodox girl, the police cleared a path, and she was led into an unmarked car.

Bruised and frightened, she said, "If the girls hadn't helped me, I don't know what would have happened."

Predictably, the incident was widely denounced. Dr Aliza Block, mayor of Beit Shemesh, called on the police to investigate the incident to the end and to act with the full extent of the law. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson declared it is "inconceivable that IDF soldiers are attacked by the citizens that the soldiers are defending".

MK Yulia Milinovsky (Yisrael Beitenu party) observed: "There is a clear similarity between this incident and what is happening in Iran," referring to the anti-hijab demonstrations. Defence Minister Benny Gantz condemned the attack, adding that "the police will know how to deal with them".

It would appear, however, that neither the police nor any other official authorities do know how to deal with these attacks by extreme ultra-Orthodox groups on anyone, and especially women, who violate their codes of dress and behaviour.

The attack against the female soldier is not the first such incident. In 2001, Naomi Regan, a well-known Orthodox novelist, was attacked by a mob when she boarded a bus.  

Nearly a decade later, in 2010, Oriyah Ferdheim, then 18 and religiously observant, was spat on, pelted with cans and other objects, and insulted because she didn't move to the back of the bus, where, the men insisted, she must sit (a practice outlawed by the Israeli Supreme Court). An off-duty soldier defended her with his own body, but the incident came to an end only after several squad cars of police officers rescued Ferdheim.

In 2011, Naama Margolese, 8, the daughter of American immigrants who are observant modern Orthodox Jews, was terrorised by ultra-Orthodox men who spat on her and called her a prostitute as she walked to primary school because she did not adhere to their more-rigorous dress code.

These violent attacks have continued, occurring several times a year.  Paint and bleach are regularly thrown at women by ultra-Orthodox "fashion critics". Last year, religious teens who walked through Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet on Shabbat to volunteer with special needs children had trash and invective hurled at them by youngsters and adults. 

Although most of the attacks are on women and girls, they are sometimes also directed at the government and even at services intended to help the community. Last month, a riot ensued when police and volunteers from ZAKA, a volunteer medical emergency group (that is composed largely of ultra-Orthodox volunteers), arrived at the scene of a traffic accident in Beit Shemesh where a local resident was killed. 

Apparently afraid that the body would be taken for an autopsy (which is forbidden under their interpretation of Jewish law), the violent demonstrators injured two police officers and damaged medical equipment.

Beit Shemesh was founded in the 1950s on the site of an ancient Canaanite town of the same name. Once a sleepy, low-status development town. it was initially settled by poor immigrants from North Africa, who were joined, in the 1980s and 1990s, by immigrants from Russia, Ethiopian, and English-speaking countries.

But the demography of the city changed radically in the late 1990s. A coalition agreement between then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ultra-Orthodox parties led to the establishment of ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in Beit Shemesh.

These new neighbourhoods were especially attractive to young ultra-Orthodox couples, who were unable to afford housing in the overcrowded, expensive ultra-Orthodox enclaves in cities like Jerusalem and Bnei Brak.

Supported by low-cost mortgages and generous welfare benefits, they organised themselves into groups and moved into their own housing projects in the city, where they could avoid accommodating themselves to the outside world.

According to a study by The Marker, the Hebrew-language daily business newspaper published by the Haaretz group, as the ultra-Orthodox population in Beit Shemesh increased, the socio-economic level of the city decreased.

This is caused by the fact that most of these ultra-Orthodox men do not work, since they believe they are commanded to study Jewish texts all day, and their families are very large, since they believe that family planning is forbidden. 

Within their self-claimed territory, these ultra-Orthodox groups police outsiders and their own members as well. Women's modesty is considered a sign of the moral fibre of the community, and signs telling women what to wear, and even what side of the street to walk on, are plastered all over.

In 2017, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the city of Beit Shemesh to remove these signs; the city regularly removes them, and, just as regularly, the same signs re-appear the next day.

Dr Shlomo Fischer is a Senior Fellow of the Jewish People Policy Institute who teaches at the Hebrew University School of Education and is a fellow of Shaharit, an independent think tank that focuses on "the politics of the common good".

With regard to women and gender, he says, "In the modern world, we see a distinction between private and public, and the way a woman dresses is considered private, even when she is in the public realm. In a traditional society, a woman's sexual identity is not private. She must be covered up all the time, everywhere."

Among these young couples who moved to Beit Shemesh are a minority who belong to the most religiously extreme groups. Like the others, they were attracted by the favourable economic conditions and the opportunity to create their own communities, based on their strict interpretations of Jewish law, especially with regard to gender and modesty. They are fervently anti-Zionist, regard the state of Israel as a blasphemous anathema, and are zealously willing to use violence to enforce their beliefs.

Indeed, says Tali Farkash, an ultra-Orthodox woman who writes a column for the Ynet news site, some of these individuals were so extreme that "even some of the ultra-Orthodox sects in Jerusalem rejected their interpretations of the law and, especially, their use of violence".

Fischer notes that these minorities are poor, have a very low status in the Haredi community, and have very little Jewish education and almost no general education. "Many of them are ba'alei t'shuva (were not born into religious families and became ultra-Orthodox), so they also feel they have to “prove themselves" to the larger ultra-Orthodox community. This is the type of combination of indices that leads to extremism," Fischer says.

 "Haredi identity on the margins is very precarious, and the boundaries between the lumpenproletariat [the unorganised lower orders of society in Marxist theory), criminal activity, and being Haredi are not really very well-defined," he adds.

He notes that gender and "modesty" have become a central issue for these groups, as they have for religious groups throughout the world, because "traditional definitions of gender and sexuality have been challenged in ways they have never been challenged before. This is a fundamental threat to a received way of life, especially in a society that often operates according to binary distinctions of right and wrong."

According to Talia Farkash, these extremist groups are unwilling to make any accommodations to the outside world – or even with other ultra-Orthodox groups. "As an ultra-Orthodox woman, I dress modestly and I'm afraid to walk through some of those neighbourhoods.”

Farkash says she believes that the general society should be more sensitive to the needs and norms of ultra-Orthodox communities. But the behaviour of these extremist groups, she emphasises, must not be tolerated. "Violent behaviour is not a cultural or religious expression. It is a crime and should be treated as such.

"Even social workers are afraid to go into these communities,” she says. “Haredi women and children are entitled to the same protections that all citizens of Israel are entitled to, but when social services are afraid, child abuse and wife abuse aren't treated. That is not acceptable."

But any attempt to impose conventional standards on these groups is perceived as persecution by the reviled Israeli state.  Indeed, during recent demonstrations, children were dressed in striped Holocaust garb to protest "the State's antisemitism", and the chief of police is regularly called a Nazi. 

Fischer says he would be inclined to leave their cultural community alone, but only as long as they don't bother anyone. And they may not create physical boundaries or to live in some sort of ex-territorialism.

"I am in favour of the liberalism of diversity, but this demands that groups respect each other," he continues. "But these people oppose any other form of life. They believe there is only one truth. And there is no one to talk to in order to come to any arrangement.

“I doubt they will accept the authority of mainstream Haredi authorities, who anyway probably won't want to accept any responsibility for these extremists. And that means that ultimately, some form of state force will have to be used against them."

Photo: Female Israeli soldier (courtesy IDF)