Church v. State

Behind the forbidding stone walls of Jerusalem's Mea Shearim quarter, hundreds of bearded, ultra-Orthodox scholars study the Torah from morning to night, and wear the fur-trimmed black hats, ankle-length gaberdines and dangling ear-locks of the medieval ghettos. On the Sabbath, the more violent among them have stoned and burned moving vehicles and shattered the windows of homes where radios were playing. The rules of the Torah and the Rabbinate strictly circumscribe the lives of their womenfolk, who must not sit with men, must cover themselves to ankle and wrist. After a rudimentary schooling, Mea Shearim girls stay at home to help their mothers with the housework seven days a week. They may not stroll about the city, dance, see movies, go swimming, or read non-religious books. When they are 17, the marriage broker comes around.

When Premier David Ben-Gurion set out to draft women into the Israel army four years ago, extremist leaders forced him to exempt Orthodox girls. Soon 30% of all girls called up blithely claimed to be Orthodox. Last year Ben-Gurion wrote a new bill which would draft Orthodox girls for work on farms, in hospitals and in immigrant camps, instead of the army. The new bill would not force ultra-Orthodox girls to wear the "unmaidenly" Israeli women's army uniforms, and would let them return to their own homes at night. Moreover, they would not be controlled by the Defense Minister, but by the motherly Labor Minister, Mrs. Golda Meyerson. Two Orthodox members of the cabinet, and Israel's Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog. approved the bill.

But the rabbis of the Mea Shearim told their congregations nothing of these compromises. At rallies of the extreme Orthodox, zealots cried that the army was preparing to stock houses of ill-fame with Orthodox girls. On the whitewashed walls of the quarters, posters appeared: "Daughters of Israel Must Prefer the Stake to Conscription." Yielding to pressure, Rabbi Herzog reversed himself, proclaimed that conscription of females would violate Jewish law.

One day last week, as the Knesset debated the bill, 10,000 Orthodox Jews from the Mea Shearim and from all over Israel converged on Shaarei Hessed Square in the biggest anti-government demonstration in Israel's troubled history. Red-eyed from weeping, they swayed and wailed, prayed, and blew upon the ram's horn, a signal of national distress. Despite their prayers, the conscription bill passed the first Knesset reading, 59 to 6.

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