In her fanciful description of the year following Judge Moshe Sobel’s decision, Bonnie Riva-Ras demonstrates that one doesn’t need to wait decades before engaging in historical revisionism. One can do so mere months later. While claiming to promote the advancement of women, Riva-Ras has attempted to write them out of history.

Perhaps her most offensive claim is that her “opponents” are men – “the most extremist haredi (ultra-Orthodox rabbis)… and politicians.” We are not rabbis, two-thirds of us are not haredi, and we certainly are not men – we are the founders of Women For the Wall, the group that disarmed Women of the Wall.

A simple question: If we formed our group in response to Sobel’s decision, then why did we create our Facebook page and website 10 days prior? Obviously Riva- Ras does not comprehend this, but we were as surprised by his decision as anyone else.

She writes that her “opponents” – thousands of Jewish women – “would not allow the law of the land… to be exercised at the Kotel.” This is akin to claiming that the privileges of democracy are reserved for preferred classes. We exercised our civil right to demonstrate, via silent prayer, that we do not wish to see the traditional plaza changed into something different – an agenda admitted by the head of Women of the Wall, Anat Hoffman, several months later.

Riva-Ras fails to recall that Women of the Wall were opposed by rowdy teenage boys prior to our formation. She claims a level of violence that simply never happened, even after the police unwisely placed Women of the Wall as close as possible to the men’s section when they found the women’s section filled to overflowing. And it is pure fiction to assert that “the riots continued for several more months and the police became less accommodating.” In actuality, our intervention got the boys to go away.

She claims that “a loudspeaker was used to try to prevent us from being able to pray.” Perhaps she is referring to the time when 10,000 Jewish women gathered to recite prayers for the health of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi Rav Ovadiah Yosef. Ninety members of Women of the Wall waded into the middle of this massive group, set their cantor up on a chair with a microphone, and proceeded to disturb all around them. Who was trying to prevent whom from praying?

If Women of the Wall wants to see women stand up for themselves, they should be celebrating our efforts rather than obscuring them. To their great surprise, we and other Orthodox women do have minds of our own. If WoW has the right to come and disturb the prayers of traditional women in order to change them, then we have the right to respond and declare our fealty to millennia of Jewish tradition.

Women of the Wall cannot brook our existence – or the absence of the boys.

Without their thuggish behavior, WoW cannot capture media attention. This explains why WoW was caught on video deliberately attempting to provoke them and draw a reaction. By highlighting every negative response, their Facebook page documents the effectiveness of our efforts – from water bottles one month, to a single egg the next, to nothing more than whistles, to complete silence. That silence, of course, was characterized by WoW as “seething hatred,” as if they could read our minds.

Here, then, is the truth. We did not create Women For the Wall to respond to the Sobel decision, or to serve as the tools of “rabbi handlers.” We created our organization to express the voice of the silent majority of women who pray consistently at the Holy Western Wall, and do not wish to see its traditions discarded or traditional Judaism maligned by WoW members around the world.

The boys did not go away due to government intervention, but due to our own. We showed them that they were misrepresenting the overwhelmingly non-violent Orthodox community, and that there is a far better answer to the animosity and provocations of the Women of the Wall. We have robbed WoW of what they sought most of all: publicity, and the opportunity to bad-mouth Orthodoxy. When they come to the Wall now, they are easily outnumbered by the traditional women who simply happen to be there. The boys no longer pay them attention, and the media no longer comes to see what will transpire.

The silent majority has spoken. It anxiously awaits the government’s response.

WOW Board knows that it has driven away many Orthodox and non-Orthodox worshipers by their religious practices, non-stop desire for media attention, their willingness to criticize Israel in North America and Europe during the years of the Al Aqsa Intifada.
 
— Phyllis Chesler, on WOW’s Facebook Wall

Phyllis Chesler was a founding member of Women Of the Wall, and is now a founding member of the “Original Women Of the Wall.” She previously called thousands of young women praying silently “mean girls at the Western Wall,” and compared traditional Jewish women to women who conduct honor killings in other cultures. But in response to a comment by WOW on their Wall, Chesler echoed many of our complaints about WOW.

She presents a myth of her own, that only the Plaza built for traditional prayer less than 40 years ago is “the historic Kotel.” This is not true. By expressing a willingness to move to Robinson’s Arch, the WOW board is acknowledging that the government has provided them a place, at the historic Kotel, where they can pray undisturbed and without disturbing others. Chesler’s group adamantly refuses to acknowledge the right of other women to pray in accordance with thousands of years of Jewish tradition, undisturbed.

Here, in case it is removed by WOW, is Phyllis Chesler’s full and unaltered comment:

I am astounded and appalled by WOW’s board’s attempt to take credit for everything and anything and to spin their sacrificing of women’s religious rights at the historic Kotel to their own P.R. advantage. These rights are the very rights that WOW’s Board has been trying to sacrifice as they have chosen to ally themselves with the Reform mixed gender minyanim and at Robinson’s Arch only. WOW Board knows that it has driven away many Orthodox and non-Orthodox worshipers by their religious practices, non-stop desire for media attention, their willingness to criticize Israel in North America and Europe during the years of the Al Aqsa Intifada–and finally, by their violation of their own basic principle to remain at the EN at the historic Kotel, not to call elsewhere “also’ the Kotel.

[Footnote: Within 3-4 hours of being posted, it was indeed removed. Thanks to the alert supporter who told us about it.]

In a truly Orwellian moment, the Women of the Wall (and HaAretz) call this a step forward for religious freedom.

I was born in the most feminist of societies � Soviet Russia. For the past 100 years, it has enabled, encouraged, even pushed women to take their equal place alongside men. Russia might have been hellish as far as human rights went, but it was a mecca of women�s lib.

My grandmothers and great aunts, educated in the 30s and 40s, worked as chemists, lawyers, and accountants. The women of my mother�s generation became doctors, researchers, and engineers. From tractor drivers to construction workers, from professors to judges, this was one big leveled playing field for us girls.

The result was a mangled society of miserable women, emasculated men, and neglected children.

The Women of the Wall would have us believe that true equality cannot be achieved unless they conquer the Kotel by praying there the way men have been praying for the past two millennia. Ironically, this rejection of the feminine Jewish experience is the epitome of misogyny. There is nothing more demeaning to women than positioning the traditionally male experience as the only one worth living, and setting up women for an ongoing game of catch-up.

I have a hunch that this is the reason that MK Dr. Aliza Lavie, a card-carrying feminist and the author of A Jewish Woman�s Prayer Book has rebuffed the Women of the Wall�s advances.

So, dear Women of the Wall, please don�t try to liberate me. Empowerment and victimhood are a choice, not a circumstance. Please don�t project the victim mentality on me and others like me.

I have liberated myself from the need to predicate my identity on becoming �one of the boys.� I have liberated myself from needing to feel like a victim of male oppression.

I have tapped into a 3,000-year old tradition which validates women. I have chosen to focus on the side of Judaism that empowers women to become agents of change. For it is in the merit of the righteous women that we have been delivered in every generation, and it is in the merit of righteous women that we will be delivered in the future.

I am profoundly grateful to have the privilege, denied to generations of my foremothers, to visit the Kotel, touch its stones, and pour my heart out to the One Above. He hears me, alright. No paraphernalia necessary.

If women of the wall just wanted to pray, that would be one thing, but they’re not after that. This is a quote from Anat Hoffman, head of Women of the Wall: “Allow men-only prayers from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., then take down the partition that separates men and women and offer access to everyone for six hours each day as “an open national monument.” In other words- allow separate davening with a mechitza only 3 hours a day, and the rest of the day, make the kotel mixed. Do you support this, or do you want to be able to daven in separate areas, with mechitzas?

Yes, I know for a fact that there are torah observant women and women without an agenda who sincerely just want to pray with women, who align themselves with the women of the wall. I ask them- why do you chose to align yourself with a woman and organization whos goal is to make a kotel where even YOU are uncomfortable praying? If Anat Hoffman got her way, and the women of the wall succeeded in their goal of abolishing the mechitzos at the kotel other than from 6-9 am, would you feel comfortable davening at the kotel anymore?

From the episodes of Korach and Nadav and Avihu, we learn three things. First, when it comes to Divine service, modern categories, like �rights of religious expression� and �equality,� are misplaced. Hashem has the ultimate say in how we relate to Him and about the form of the relationship. And He may not be egalitarian – the second thing we learn. Korach�s challenge to the unique status of Moshe and Aharon was also a challenge to truth of the prophecy received from Hashem and, as such, met with immediate Divine punishment. And third, sincerity – i.e., the desire, even intense desire, to worship Hashem in a particular fashion – is not enough. As we saw, Korach�s followers sincerely wanted to draw close to Hashem.

They came to the Kosel to make a political statement: We reject any gender distinctions in Judaism. The specific attraction to forms of garb worn for prayer by men and public prayer in a minyan, which is only halachically incumbent on men, without first being meticulous in all matters of observance equally obligatory on men and women, is a feminist statement, not a religious one.

While the Kosel may possess no special holiness for the heterodox movements, it does offer the maximum potential for confrontation. And Anat Hoffman is canny enough to know that casting herself as Rosa Parks circa 1955 guarantees maximum photo-ops in The New York Times. And those, in turn, help fill the coffers of the minuscule Reform movement in Israel and energize the heterodox movements abroad by providing them with a cause – �equal religious rights.� No matter how spruced up and expanded the new area for egalitarian prayer, the heterodox movements will cavil at the Sharansky plan out of fear that with the potential for confrontation reduced, the area reserved for them will quickly fall into disuse.