A confrontation erupted on Wednesday morning between a group of Women of the Wall and Itamar Gadassi, an ultra-Orthodox man who burned a Reform siddur-prayer book, the website B’hadrei Haredim reported. Police first tried to remove the man but eventually gave up and allowed him to stay under close watch.
The confrontation took place on the first day of the Jewish month of Adar, when the mostly Reform and Conservative Women of the Wall (WOW) come to the Kotel to pray and sing Hallel—a selection of psalms praising God. This month, the 27-year spat between Reform and Orthodox traditions against the background of an official government recognition of the Reform movement’s right to its own section of the Kotel, where it will be allowed to pray in mixed-sex groups on a platform near the southern end of the Wall, which has already earned the nickname “the sun deck.”
On Wednesday morning, religious radio station Radio Kol Hai hosted Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, the official rabbi of the Kotel, who threatened to resign should the government carry out its decision.
Itamar Gadassi, who ignited the Reform siddur, told B’hadrei Haredim that he had been upset at the “provocation” of the Women of the Wall, who sang and prayed aloud on the other side of the mehitza-partition. Jewish law regards a woman’s voice as sexually provocative, which is why it is considered a disturbance to men during prayer.
Apparently, Wednesday was Gadassi’s very first encounter with the concept of the WOW, as he said in the interview, “It was trippy, it was impossible to pray the silent prayer with the proper kavanah-intent, they wouldn’t stop dancing and singing. I asked them to stop and they didn’t respond. I told them they were disturbing us, stop, but they persisted.”
There’s no doubt that the main purpose of the WOW is to create provocation, which is why they don’t opt for finishing their prayers indoor someplace and coming to the Kotel for a quiet gathering afterwards, or, alternatively, praying away from the hostile male crowd, by the “Little Kotel” over in the Muslim Quarter, which is just as authentic as its bigger section, and where men and women have been praying together without any objection from anyone (see picture). However, Gadassi’s overzealous reaction was unexpected:
“By the end of the prayer I got hold of their impure, heretical siddur, and I started to leaf through it,” he recalled. “The siddur contained new gods, like ‘the god of Sara, the god of Rivka, the god of Rachel.’ I was shocked and burned the siddur. Everything in it is against men, and they have a shlukhat-tzibbur (female cantor). In the Hallel they add hallucinatory things such as ‘When Adar arrives we increase the joy.'”
Modern colloquial Hebrew uses “hazui” as in fantastic, trippy, or hallucinatory, to describe things that are just a bit out of the ordinary. Hebrew speakers are quite the excitable bunch. In this instance, Gadassi was dubbing “delusional” the Reform choice of adding the names of the mothers to the opening segment of the silent prayer, and the very common reference to joy on Adar, the month of Purim, to the traditional Hallel text — because the Reform don’t feel bound at all by halakha. And when you get a raw encounter between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Geula in Jerusalem, things sometimes go up in flames.
Halachically speaking, although no one in their right mind would recommend it nowadays, Gadassi was correct to burn the Reform siddur, because a Torah scroll written by a heretic should be burned, at least according to one opinion (Tractate Gittin 45b). This should not be taken as a call to action, God forbid, there are probably much less aggressive ways to please our Father in Heaven.