From Haaretz:
The ultra-Orthodox community in Mea She’arim is planning to impose gender segregation in the Jerusalem neighborhood’s streets on Sukkot, despite a High Court order forbidding it. Women’s rights and other watchdog groups intend to fight against the segregation, which excludes women from certain streets in the neighborhood during the intermediate days of Sukkot. . .
Large billboards posted throughout the capital’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods this week forbade women to enter Mea She’arim Street during the celebration.
“Women … are requested to use alternative streets on their way home and to synagogues … to help prevent mingling,” the posters say.
Last year community leaders put up tarpaulin partitions along the sidewalks on Strauss and Mea She’arim streets, creating a narrow path on one side for women to walk on. The other sidewalk and the center of the street were reserved for men. A group calling itself “the neighborhood committee” operated “ushers” to make sure the women were keeping to the narrow path.
From the New York Daily News:
City workers have removed signs warning women in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn to step aside for men. But the Parks Department says the teardowns in South Williamsburg had nothing to do with the message itself; it’s just illegal to post signs on street trees.
“We do not know who put up the signs,” said Parks spokeswoman Trish Bertuccio.
The large signs started popping up in the neighborhood more than a week ago. They had a Yiddish message that translates as: “Precious Jewish daughter, please move to the side when a man approaches.”
Neighborhood residents were annoyed the plastic signs, which were bolted into the wood, were taken away.
“The signs don’t bother anybody,” said Abraham Klein, 18. “Men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”
The Daily News quotes Deborah Feldman, an ex-Hasid, who explains the signs were posted “as part of a crackdown on rebellious behavior by women,” she continues, “It’s a way of the community reminding people to stay in line, so to speak.”
I used to be very indignant about all this gender segregation until I started studying the primitive cultures of New Guinea. Excessive contact with womens is considered by them to be enervating, and besides, it saps your “essence”, your precious bodily fluids.
I am glad Israel is taking a stand in favor of the conservation of precious male bodily fluids.
“Men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”
And I was ready to lay the blame (from end to end, if you must know) for not defusing the Palestinian demographic time bomb at the feet of the closed thighs of Jewish women! Silly me!
Frankly, if we are gonna beat them Ay-rabs, we better throw all this gender seperation stuff to the winds, and turn Israel into one big orgy, with all children, no matter what their origin, supported by the Jewish State. You know, like a kibbutz.
Mooser hints at this: If all the women in the Hasidic neighborhoods who will agree not to walk on certain streets were laid end to end, one wouldn’t be surprised.
No, but seriously.
These separation anxieties are yet another example of how people who get a taste of the seizure of power use it brainlessly, nye-kulturny-ly, and sometimes illegally. The desire to own the world and to rule the world (and to impose rules on weaker beings like dogs and women) IN DEFIANCE of the civil authority and the moeurs of the time and place is a sickness of Jewish fundies (and others? Muslim fundies?) and RUNS UP AGAINST THE OLD Rabbinic rule which tells Jews to make nice with the people among whom they live, not to twist the tail of the (non-Jewish) authorities (such as the secular government of Israel).
One wonders what deviltries these Jewish fundies have in mind for the non-Jewish women (or non-fundi women) who might accidentally walk in “their” neighborhoods during days of ritual cleanliness (or separation) or fluid preservation.
“Men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”
So men and men go together? Ladeez & Ladeez? OK, so, if John Stewart doesn’t take Mr. Klein’s line and run with it he needs to return one of his Emmies.
“Precious Jewish daughter”.. Gag me. How to transparently insult a woman 101.
What a bunch of barbarians.