BEIT SHEMESH, Israel (Reuters) – American immigrant Ayelet Wortman was walking with a male friend on a weekend afternoon when a black-cloaked ultra-Orthodox Jew grabbed him from behind, ripped his shirt, and called her a “whore.”
“We literally ran all the way back home,” some blocks away, Wortman, 18, said in an interview in Beit Shemesh, a flashpoint Israeli city near Jerusalem where tensions have flared over an increasingly assertive and aggressive sect of religious zealots.
That incident happened a couple of years ago, but the story of an eight-year-old girl being spat upon on her way to school has riveted national attention and drawn pledges by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to crack down on the harassment.
Several thousand women’s right activists, liberals and religious pluralists rallied in Beit Shemesh Tuesday against what they described as the coercive encroachment of patriarchal ultra-Orthodox values in the mostly secular Jewish state.
Women have complained of being forced to sit in the back of buses in many cities where the ultra-Orthodox live. Two women were barred from going to the podium to accept prizes at a recent ceremony sponsored by a religious cabinet minister.
“We are fighting for the soul of the nation,” President Shimon Peres said earlier
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