In Israel, women’s faces are a threat to faith – and health

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For many years, I’ve been leading the Israel Religious Action Center’s fight against the exclusion of women and gender segregation in the public sphere.

I’ve fought bus drivers who sent women to the back of the bus, burial societies who forced family members to separate by gender and prevented women from eulogizing their loved ones, against modesty signs aiming to limit women’s dress and freedom of movement, and a public radio station which did not allow women’s voices on air. All of those battles have ended in legal victories.

And yet attempts to erase women from the public sphere continue.

The most recent trend is to attempt to exclude images of women in the public domain. This includes the vandalization of ads which present images of women and preemptively publishing ads and publicity materials that don’t include women’s images, so as not to anger the ultra-Orthodox radicals who would either vandalize the ads or boycott the business for advertising women.

I have always felt strongly about making sure that women are given an equal and respectable place in the public sphere, but recently it has become personal.

A few weeks ago, an ultra-Orthodox news site published a picture of representatives of the Reform and Conservative movements and Women of the Wall in a meeting with the President of Israel about the Western Wall. The faces of all the women in the picture – including myself – were blurred. The men’s faces were not.

I felt humiliated and enraged. The erasure of women is a violent act which sends a message that women have no place in the public sphere – that our very presence is harmful. This sends an appalling message to Israeli women and girls.

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I am presently in physical therapy treatment at my health clinic in Jerusalem and have started to visit two separate clinics on a regular basis. One is located in a primarily religious and ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. The other is the main clinic in downtown Jerusalem – serving people from all sectors of society.

In both clinics, there are dozens of ads that portray men and boys only. The only female displayed is a small image of a blurred woman in an ad against domestic violence. Female doctors and nurses are employed in those clinics, but are nevertheless they are missing from the ads on the walls.

The only female displayed on the walls of the health clinics I visit is a small image of a blurred woman in an ad against domestic violence. The rest – doctors, nurses, patients – are all menOrly Erez-Likhovski

The fact that women and girls do not see themselves reflected in health clinics sends the harsh message that women do not belong there – neither as doctors nor as patients. It creates a discriminatory reality where women should not be seen – in general and in the medical world in particular. This causes harm to the doctors, the nurses, and the patients present in the clinic. Every visit to the clinic causes me to feel anger, anguish, humiliation and frustration.

The clinic’s response to my Facebook post on the issue made me even angrier. They responded that while gender equality matters, it is subject to “cultural accommodation” to make health care accessible to certain populations. It seems that the health clinic forgot that women in every sector should be treated equally and should not be ‘disappeared’ because of the demands of some of the customers.

Discrimination cannot be practiced as a way to accommodate those who demand the inferiority or invisibility of women. Surely the clinic would not accommodate a demand to eliminate people on the basis of their skin color or race; in a similar way, demands to eliminate women voiced by a small radical ultra-Orthodox group, inventing new restrictions which were not practiced until a decade or two ago, should not be accommodated.

In the face of such blatant acts of exclusion, I will not remain silent. We have sent letters to both the health clinic and the news site. Should things stay the same, we will not hesitate to take legal action.

In an earlier political time, the women’s movement taught us that the personal is political. I’ve learned that it also works the other way around: when the political is personal, I am even more determined to fight for equal rights to convey the “revolutionary” idea that women should be treated equally.

Advocate Orly Erez-Likhovski is executive director of the Israeli Religious Action Center, IRAC, dedicated to securing civil rights for a just and egalitarian Israel based on Israeli law and Jewish tradition. Previously, she was the organization’s legal director