… where ultra-orthodox Jewish women in the hundreds are covering their faces and being mistaken by police for terrorists and annoying their husbands.
A group of these women is demanding a totally veiled school for their daughters, where everyone will wear the burqa.
So annoyed are their husbands that they have gotten a major rabbinical organization to ban the practice. But this won’t work, since the women are under the control of a charismatic burqa-cult leader — a woman accused of child abuse.
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I find most intriguing about the Israeli story the language Israelis and other observers are bringing to burqa wearing. It is the language of pathology. Burqa wearing is a “craze,” it’s “weird,” it’s “obsessional,” it’s a kind of nutty “competitiveness” — who can be the most zealous? It’s a “sexual fetish”, it’s “promiscuous,” it’s “extreme” …
What happened to the language of religious respect most observers have brought to Muslim women wearing burqas in Europe?
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:39AM
Respectful discourse seems unlikely to me, for the following reasons.
1. Israeli society is highly polarized between the religious and secular, particularly because the extremely Orthodox Hareidi community, who refuse to interact with mainstream Israel in a way more modern leaning Orthodox Jews will. This sentiment is aggravated because the Hareidi community controls the swing votes in the parliament and is a massive net receiver of tax dollars and services. Hareidim and chilonim (secular Israelis) generally have nothing but contempt for each other.
2. Within the Orthodox community, the burqa women are wildly controversial. Modern Orthodox Jews, who try to differentiate themselves from Hareidim view this as a sign of the growing rightward drift of Orthodoxy and a sign of the growing gap between the Harieidi world and other streams of Orthodoxy. The Hareidi community itself highly prizes conformity and keeping community modesty norms. (This is valued so highly that many garments that meet Orthodox modesty standards will not be worn because the community deems them unacceptable.) These women, by donning the burqa are rejecting Hareidi modesty standards and norms for women. It’s bucking the accepted social order in a big and very unacceptable way. This looks like it’s going to be schismatic in Ramat Beit Shemeh, and that never goes neatly in the Hareidi world. This is so controversial in the Hareidi world that it looks like the Eida Chareidis, which is the most universally respected Hareidi body in Israel looks like they will ban the burqa for women that follow them.
http://www.thejc.com/node/36322
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:28PM
Meg: Many thanks for that comment. I agree that the polarization of Israeli society at the moment is extreme — some reporters I’ve read over there call it an existential threat, with the haredim population – contemptuous of Israel and of Israel’s laws – growing quickly.
For what it’s worth, I wonder if the belligerent adoption of the burqa among these women is designed to piss off their husbands. That is, I wonder if this isn’t a slave revolt. You repress us beyond our capacity to tolerate it? We’ll show you! We’ll beat you at your own game and humiliate the hell out of you while we’re at it.
August 3rd, 2010 at 7:56PM
Women’s place in Israeli Hareidi life is usually couched in terms of modesty. One of the sages said (paraphrased) “Tznius [modesty] is the highest duty of a woman as Torah learning is for men.” It does not surprise me that this is the language being used to communicate in RBS right now.
Most political issues concerning Hareidi womanhood are couched in terms of modesty, even if they are only tangentially related. When the Israeli supreme court recently ordered Hareidi girls’ schools to integrate and teach both Sefardi and Ashkenazi girls, the Ashkenazi establishment’s opposition was often couched in the language of tznius. Sefardi girls, it was argued, know more about religious rituals that relate to sex and menstruation, so it’s not tznius to educate them with Ashkenazi girls whose parents do not want this discussed.
You also have to understand that, within Hareidi culture, there is a certain competition surrounding modesty. Tznius study groups are often formed by and for women, where the women work through Rabbi Falk’s book Modesty, and Adornment for Life* and work to improve their own tznius level. It’s one of relatively few acceptable outlets of religious study for Hareidi women. Most do not have stufficient education to delve into even the lighter classical Jewish texts, so popular books on modesty are one of Hareidi women’s main connections with Jewish thought.
Women who go above and beyond the law in matters of modesty have been considered meritorious for a very long time in the Jewish tradition. In the Talmud, the story of Kimchis is recounted. She was worthy to have 5 sons serve as high priests in the temple. She said “the walls of the house never saw a hair on my head.” In other word, Kimchis went far beyond the standard of covering her hair except when alone of with her husband–she kept her hair covered constantly, even when sleeping. She even had one of her maid hold a shawl over hear head and she would only let down her hair and brush it beneath that. Kimchis’ example has become a new standard in many hareidi circles.
All of that being said, some people have speculated that Bruria Keren, the ringleader of the burqa women, is actually mentally ill. In addition to facing charges of child abuse, she goes on “speech fasts” where she speaks to basically nobody for days at a time, a practice which has never, ever existed in the Jewish tradition. She also doesn’t merely dress extremely modestly, but will wear 10 skirts at a time and multiple shirts and then heap veils atop that. That isn’t normative behavior among extremely modest women, Jewish or Muslim. A Mother In Israel has done the best coverage on the issue, and it’s worth checking out her posts.
http://www.amotherinisrael.com/burkas-the-new-fashion/
http://www.amotherinisrael.com/jewish-facecovering-women-request-school/
*Most of it is up for free on Google Books, should you fancy reading it.
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:24PM
Meg: Again, thanks for that, and for those links. I tried to play it gently on the Keren story in my initial post, but – I haven’t read as much as you, but I’ve read a good deal of the Israeli press on haredim generally and the burqa cult in particular – it does seem to me that even a casual observer would conclude the woman is insane.
All communities have some insane people in them; what’s fascinating to me as a student of cults (this is part of the reason I love the novels of Don DeLillo) is that this madwoman has a rather significant following.
I follow the larger burqa issue quite closely; and what seems possible to me is that the line between modesty and frigidly compulsive self-erasure (ten layers; not speaking, etc.) has pretty much been crossed here. Here, piety becomes fanaticism becomes self-punishing dementia; and what better instrument of extremist self-abnegation than the burqa?
Finally, as a general point: The trend in the haredi population seems, among the men, toward violence outward, and, among the woman (where else can they go?) violence inward. As you know, few days go by in Israel without some form of mass (male) haredi violence in the streets… I think there’s a kind of synergy or parallelism or whatever you want to call it in the development of the closed haredi population toward inner as well as outer violence.
August 4th, 2010 at 2:34AM
A couple of extra points:
Speech fasts are actually mentioned in Chaim Potok’s novel, The Chosen, as an outlier practice. Not the norm, but not condemned either.
In nineteenth century Iran, Orthodox Jewish women wore what looks a lot like hijab, ie full cloak coverings, some with veils. The pictures are in Manchester (UK) Jewish Musuem.
Because the division of labour in the Orthodox Jewish communities is organised around enabling men to study, women often have a lot of other skills that you wouldn’t associate with an oppressed group–running small businesses for example. Furthermore, there are specific places where Jewish women meet ie the mikva and in the segregated synagogues. So when it comes to organising themselves, they are not going to be as easily undermined as one might expect. The Orthodox oppose what we could call theoloigcal education for women but not necessarily certain forms of secular education. My own UK university has a lot of ultra Orthodox women in the occupational therapy programme.
August 4th, 2010 at 6:38AM
Farah: Those details are helpful. I don’t know much about the ultra Orthodox in the UK – my focus has been on Israel and the increasingly controversial haredi population there – but I think any effort to argue that these women by and large don’t look oppressed is likely to fail.
They are kept profoundly, disablingly, ignorant. The burden on them to continue having children throughout their fertile years is so intense, and their poverty is so intense, that there’s very little in the way of work they can do, outside of taking care of their many children. (As you may know, rates of child abuse and sexual abuse in this population are significant.)
They are forced to sit in the back of segregated buses.
Indeed, many of these women, already living burdened and humiliated lives, will also have to find work in order to support husbands who are not the scholars or serious students of the Torah that they pretend to be. (As in all fields, only a small number of haredim are serious scholars of the Torah, worthy of state support in a lifetime commitment to its study.)
August 4th, 2010 at 8:50AM
The Hareidi world in Israel is several notches more right wing than either the American or British Hareidi communities. They are also much, much poorer. I know Hareidi families with 10 children living in a 1BR. Hunger is also a persistent problem in the community.
Many Israeli Hareidi women do act as the main breadwinner, but it’s extremely difficult because they are constantly pregnant or nursing. The practice of men studying in kollel (yeshiva for married men) for years on end while their wives bring in the income is a lot rarer in American and British communities, for a variety of reasons. Physical, occupational and speech therapy are popular occupations among American and British Hareidi women (it’s a standing joke: http://www.printfection.com/purimtees/OT-PT-or-Special-ED-Womens-Fitted-Baseball-Tee/_p_1117977) but the Israeli community has had a hard time training women for careers where they can earn decently and still maintain extremely rigid religious standards. Secular universities are right out, but even if women go to one of the all women’s Hareidi colleges and earn a degree, they still need to find a workplace that will not require much (if any) interaction with men or non religious people, working on Jewish holidays, frequent maternity leaves and rigid, often unprofessional looking modesty standards. Particularly as the Israeli taxpayer gets fed up and the money from the parents and grandparents of the current generation runs out (many Hareidim from the War and Post War generations did have decently earning careers and can partially support married adult children) the community will have to make hard choices.
@Farah
I should have made the distinction. The burqa women, along with most of the power structure in Ramat Beit Shemesh are Ashkenazi (ancestors from Eastern Europe), not Sefardi (ancestors from the Middle East and North Africa). There IS a tradition of Jewish women from Muslim countries wearing garb we usually associate with Muslims, though they mostly abandoned the practice after they came to Israel. (This is a photo of some recent Yemenite-Jewish immigrants to New York, note the abaya in niqab on the women. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125693376195819343.html) The burqa women aren’t second or third generation Israeli-Yementie/Syrian/Afghan Jews reviving an old practice, though–for Ashkenazi women, this is something that is not part of their traditional Jewish practice; it’s an invention. Sticking to the minhagim (customs) of your particular ancestor’s community is considered very important in the Orthodox world; it’s not normal even for families of one European origin to adopt a different community’s practices, let alone for people to choose to go from (high status) Ashkenazi minhagim to (lower status) Sefardi minhagim.
Thanks for the correction about The Chosen.