The Feminist Story the Media Missed at the Kotel
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
May 17, 2013
That the Women of the Wall's (WoW) monthly visits to the Western Wall will provoke insults, spitting, and sometimes worse from a group of haredim at the Western Wall is old news. But there was another story last Friday that the media either missed or botched entirely: the thousands of Jewish women and girls who filled the area directly in front of the Kotel and almost to the back wall of the Kotel plaza, completely dwarfing the group of one hundred or so women associated with WoW. (The figure of 400 to 500 WoW given by some media outlets is patent nonsense.)
When I arrived at the Kotel a little past 7:00 a.m., there were about 25 (not 2,000 as reported by Ha'aretz) young haredi men standing on the upper level at the far north of the Kotel Plaza shouting and ruining the prayers for all those on the men's side who had come to pray on Rosh Hodesh. (I had already heard on the radio that police had arrested one haredi man.) What surprised me, however, was that the most prominent video camera remained exclusively focused on this small group among the many thousands then at the Kotel.
