Religious extremists terrorise Israeli town
27 December, 2011
Ultra-Orthodox on rampage in Beit Shemesh, 3 TV crews attacked
TEL AVIV - "They called me shameless, brazen. They even spat at me". Naama Margulis, a skinny, bespectacled girl approaching her eight birthday, tells the television cameras that she has become afraid to travel the 300 metres that separate her hom in Beit Shemesh (west of Jerusalem) from her school.
This is because the feared "Sikarikim" are waiting along the road. The self-styled "guardians of modesty" have established that the Margulis family, though they live devoutly, are an affront to public decency, claiming that the young girl is an "unbearable person" because, they say, "she does not dress modestly enough".
Speaking on television, the young girl says that she has been spat at and called "bawdy". Two minutes on the television news on the commercial Channel 2 were enough for little Naama' to ignite the tinderbox that is Beit Shemesh, a sleepy town previously inhabited by working-class Sephardis, before being left to its fate on the margins of the major Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, and becoming a delicate ultra-Orthodox suburb in the last decade. Here the first generation of religious fanaticism has been unashamedly consummated. A year ago, the first "Taliban women" appeared, Orthodox Jewish women covered from head to toe by numerous layers to hide their shapes. Alongside them, the aggressive "Sikarikim" began to lay down the law. The "guardians of modesty", whose name is evocative of the zealots who 2,000 years ago, under Roman occupation, would stab integrated Jews with a "Sika" (dagger).
Compared to the "Taliban women", the unfortunate Naama also appears to the Sikarikim to be a walking example of indecency that should be eradicated. For some time already, though this was not previously known, pavements in Beith Shemesh have been separated by gender, forbidding women from walking past the synagogues frequented by extremists. Hardline rabbis in the town have also been giving explicit orders to women not to stay in the streets for longer than family needs dictate and not to gather at the entrance to homes. There is probably no other place in Israel where hardline rabbis have such an ability to lay down the law.
This week, Naama's brief television appearance led to an escalation in the situation. Television crews descended on Beit Shemesh. Reporters were surrounded by hostile crowds and three of them were attacked. "We were about to be lynched," one cameraman says. When the town authorities tried to remove signs ordering the separation of the sexes in the streets, mass protests were staged, with police forced to disperse the troublemakers. The signs reappeared soon after.
Source: ANSAMed.
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