Knitted news17.10.22 20:43 22 in Tishrei Tishpag
(Photo: Moshe Shai/Flash90)
Journalist Emily Amrossi celebrated Simchat Torah in Givat Shmuel and came back with culture shock. Amrosi, who lived for years in the settlement of Talmon in West Benjamin, moved several years ago to Kiryat Menachem in Jerusalem, and this year she stayed at Givat Shmuel and was amazed by the place of women in the synagogue on the holiday.
According to her, this is not a comprehensive study, but an observation of four large and central synagogues, and she noticed that the women sit with the women’s help and only look at the men dancing, without taking part in the dancing with Torah scrolls or women’s reading. She summed up the experience with the words: “What is in the rest of the country is the fruit of the struggle of ten years ago – in GVS it remains as it was in the 18th century.”
According to her, when she asked why they don’t pass the Torah book to the women’s helpers as well, she replied: ‘What the hell, and why would we want to?’, ‘Look for such things in Gush Etzion’, ‘Who cares’, ‘What is the problem with dancing with ourselves’ and more. The reading of the Torah for women was also done in Givat Shmuel “only in settings that are considered subversive or in groups that call them egalitarian in advance (and there are few of those in the HVS) and not in every synagogue. They all directed me to Beit Ha’am, a place where they gathered the dancing feminists.”
In the continuation of the post she published on Facebook, she writes that in Talmon, which is considered a conservative settlement, it has been customary for women to convert to the Torah according to Halacha for ten years. Also in her community in Kiryat Menachem, there is a women’s conversion to the Torah “and women from the right side of the Dosi axis participate in it.”
She ended the post with the words: “And here I discover that the religious city in Israel, considered (perhaps mistakenly) to be the capital of the laity/Hafipenniks, maintains the same circles of men around the holy place, and women far away. Timahon.”
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