The Women of the Wall prayer rights activist group will hold their monthly prayer service at the Western Wall today and the Jerusalem police has stated that the group will be able to pray in the women’s section at the site.
Last month, thousands of haredi schoolgirls filled the women’s section entirely preventing WoW from holding their service there, and were forced to conduct it at the entrance to the Western Wall plaza complex away from the wall.
The group expressed intense displeasure with the arrangements last month, saying that the police should have enabled them to pray in the area facing the wall behind the main prayer sections for men and women at the very least.
WoW has announced that it will blowing the shofar in today’s morning prayers, as is customary in the month of Elul, and will also bring a Torah scroll to the entrance of the complex.
It is not permitted to bring private Torah scrolls into the area so only the scrolls held by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which administers the site, are available for use.
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall and chairman of the Foundation, has not allowed WoW use of these Torah scrolls.
A decision by the Jerusalem District Court in April this year ruled that women should be permitted to don prayer shawls and pray according to their own customs at the Western Wall, something that was hitherto prohibited.
Before the ruling, the police have enforced a 2003 ruling of the Supreme Court and directives from the Justice Ministry that upheld the Regulations for the Protection of Holy Places to the Jews, dating from 1981, that forbids performing religious ceremonies that are “not according to local custom” or that “may hurt the feelings of the worshipers” at the site, where local custom is interpreted to mean Orthodox practice.
This prevented women from performing Jewish customs usually carried out only by men in Orthodox practice such as wearing a prayer shawl or reading from the Torah.
On Wednesday, the office of Rabinowitz announced that both he and the Jerusalem police were calling on haredi representatives in the Jerusalem Municipality to prevent haredi school girls from going to the Western Wall this month, in light of security concerns ahead of the last day of Ramadan and large number of Muslims expected to arrive in the Old City and the Temple Mount.
Haredi politicians from United Torah Judaism, both national and municipal, were the driving force behind recent haredi protests against the Women of the Wall.
Rabinowitz said he also called on the WoW to come “according to the previous arrangement” and not to wear tephillin.