Please read this letter from Anat Hoffman (director of IRAC, the Israel Religious Action Center) about religious freedom and women's rights in Israel...

Dear Friends of IRAC,
When I was on the Jerusalem city council, I gave a lot of thought to earthquakes. The seismologists had figured out that every eighty years an earthquake strikes Israel, and since the last major earthquake occurred in 1927, we are due for another one soon. Many things have not changed since my city council days – Israel was and is not prepared to deal with an earthquake and its aftermath. Only in 1980 did Israel start building according to earthquake safety codes. We are better prepared for biological or chemical warfare than we are for natural disaster.

The fault line runs from the Dead Sea, and into Jerusalem; it passes under Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Kotel. Some of the holiest structures in the world could be gone in one morning. And while my interrogation two weeks ago certainly rocked the Jewish world, it is nothing compared to what an earthquake could do.

I believe the greater tragedy would not be the destruction of holy structures, but the destruction of holy human life. The terrible earthquake in Haiti reminded me that too often we think about the stones of these structures, animating them with our thoughts, but forget about the lives being lived around them, and the individual spirits that fill them with prayer.

Women who pray out loud at the Kotel are told that their voices offend the very stones of the Wall – no mention that in the name of protecting the feelings of these sacred stones, a living woman can be made to feel marginalized and humiliated. Too often we forget about each other, we forget we’re each alive.

This past week I’ve been moved in so many ways – by the heroic efforts of the Israeli emergency responders and by international aid relief efforts in Haiti, and more personally, by the outpouring of support we’ve received from around the world for Women of the Wall and religious pluralism.

From one of my favorite passages in Isaiah: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:1). The walls of the house can be built of anything, anywhere; it is the people who dwell there that count.

L’shalom,
Anat Hoffman

P.S. If you have not done so already, please send the following letter of support to your country’s Israeli ambassador.

Dear _____,

On behalf of the Jewish people fighting for religious pluralism in Israel, I am outraged that one of our leaders, Anat Hoffman, was interrogated and fingerprinted by Jerusalem police on January 5th, 2010. Police told Hoffman, Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center and leader of Women of the Wall, that she may be charged with a felony for violating the rules of conduct at what many consider to be Judaism’s most sacred site.
Hoffman’s interrogation came less than two months after the November 18th, 2009 arrest of the Women of the Wall member Nofrat Frankel for wearing a talit and holding a sefer Torah.

We will not tolerate this discrimination and abuse to continue among our own people. Women are treated as second-class citizens at a holy and historic place that has great symbolic importance for all Jews.

We are shocked by the brutal and callous insults to which Women of the Wall have been subjected. Many of these curses cannot be repeated in polite company. Israeli police have seen fit to arrest women who go to the wall for peaceful prayer, and make no attempt to reprimand those who spit and curse at them, a stark reminder of the power enjoyed by the Israeli ultra-Orthodox, and their success in forcing their religious practices on an entire nation.
If this were to happen in any other country in the world, the Jewish community would be up in arms. Israel is the rare democracy today that tolerates and even endorses religious discrimination against Jews.

Make no mistake: What appears to be a growing religious crisis in Israel is as much a threat to Israel's survival as are the external threats, and perhaps more so. Israel has shown that she can protect herself from armies and terrorists. Protecting herself from religious extremism may be Israel's biggest challenge--a challenge that cannot and must not be ignored by those who care about Israel’s soul.
We cannot allow this discrimination to continue any further. We must protect our religious rights in Israel.
Pass on our message to the Israeli government: the Kotel is the beating heart center for the whole of the Jewish people, and not an Ultra-Orthodox synagogue. The arrest and intimidation of women praying at the Wall must stop. The Wall must become a place where all Jews can pray and connect spiritually to Israel.
Israeli Ambassador to the United States:

Michael Oren
Embassy of Israel
3514 International Dr. N.W.
Washington DC 20008