“I’m leaving completely heartbroken. I thought I was going
to live in Beit Shemesh forever.”
Those are the only words that Hadassah Margolese was willing
to say on the record as she sadly packed her belongings in boxes preparing to
move out of the city of Beit Shemesh. She left on Tuesday.
Margolese and her daughter Na’ama became the symbols of the
struggle against extremist ultra-Orthodox coercion when they were featured on a
television broadcast in 2011, after men who objected to the presence of
Na’ama’s school near their neighborhood screamed, spit and threw objects at the
schoolgirls, whose long sleeved shirts and long skirts they deemed immodest.
The program, which showed Na’ama clinging to her mother’s
leg, afraid to go to school, triggered a public outcry. In the ensuing years,
Hadassah has periodically taken advantage of her high profile to speak out,
part of the vanguard of national religious Beit Shemesh residents who were
determined to stand their ground and refuse to allow Mayor Moshe Aboutboul, a
member of the Shas party, to transform Beit Shemesh into a haredi city.
Margolese has spoken out and written about incidents that
disturbed her, including an instance in which little girls' faces were blurred
out on Purim-themed flyers that were distributed in her neighborhood.
With that history, when I heard Margolese was leaving Beit
Shemesh, I assumed that it was because she had her fill of Haredi extremism,
and was tired of holding the fort against ultra-Orthodox forces. It seemed
peculiar, however, that she would do it now, just as the Beit Shemesh election
campaign was heating up and there was hope for creating real change by
unseating Mayor Aboutboul and replacing him with someone who would take Beit
Shemesh in a more positive direction.
So I was surprised to learn, from a source close to
Margolese, that her decision to leave primarily stemmed from a feeling of being
attacked, not by the ultra-Orthodox extremists – but by members of her own
national religious “knitted kippa” community. This past May, after an upsetting
experience at the mikveh, she wrote an op-ed piece in the Hebrew-language
newspaper Ma’ariv describing how she left the ritual immersion weeping, and
feeling “pained and humiliated.”
She described how the on-duty female mikveh attendant, known
as a "balanit," insisted she was wearing eye makeup even though she
knew she had scrubbed it off. The balanit stood her ground and so did
Margolese, as she described in the piece: “For some reason the balanit felt it
was her job to watch me before and after my immersion, without turning around.
Looking at me the whole time.
“I was nervous; I just wanted to end the humiliating ritual
and go home. I didn’t tell her to turn around even though she had no reason to
stand there and stare at me. But if she would refuse to let me immerse, I’d
just have to find another mikveh where I could find myself in exactly the same
position. So I kept quiet,” Margolese wrote, declaring that she deserved
privacy and “did not need a babysitter” in the mikveh.
Her goal, she said, was to help focus on the issue of making
the mikveh experience public and meaningful.
The behavior of mikveh attendants has been a hot topic among
modern Orthodox women in recent months, culminating in a petition submitted by
the Itim advocacy organization to the Religious Services Ministry declaring
that the ‘interrogation’ of women by mikveh attendants violate women’s dignity
and right to privacy, and detailing the multiple complaints they have received
on the subject.
The question under debate is the extent of the attendant’s
responsibility – whether she is to play a minimal role in assisting women when
requested and maintaining the facility. Itim has received complaints from women
like Margolese who feel violated when they are forced to stand naked – or
wrapped in a towel – and answer questions that ranged from inquiries about
their of birth control, to how thoroughly they cleaned their bodies in
preparation for immersion, or be denied them immersion because of a body
piercing.
Mikvot are used primarily by Orthodox women who observe
family purity laws, and immerse themselves following their menstrual cycle
before they resume marital relations with their husbands. Some attendants,
presumably instructed by their superiors, are extremely pro-active in
"helping" the women determine whether they are ritually pure enough
to immerse.
The Itim organization contends that women should not have to
sacrifice their privacy for the privilege of immersing in a mikveh, and asks
that the Ministry instruct the attendants to better respect this value.
After Margolese’s piece was published in Ma’ariv, she posted
the article on her Facebook page and so did her husband. While she had
experienced hostile confrontations coming from outside her community regarding
feminist issues such as Orot Banot and Women of the Wall, she was deeply thrown
by the angry comments from those she considers friends and members of her
community regarding her writing on the mikveh.
The source close to Margolese said that hostile comments
were posted both on her and her husband’s Facebook page, accusing her of lying about
her experience, exposing the community to public shaming (even though the piece
did not mention the city or the specific mikveh) and calling the balanit
“twisted” for staring at her, as well as other “name-calling.” She was
surprised that after the national religious community had criticized the
haredim for trying to cover up what needed changing and refusing to speak out,
but when she spoke out in an effort to change something in their community, she
was accused of airing dirty laundry, painting the mikveh experience as
negative, and giving ammunition to anti-religious political groups.
Although those who were supportive in Beit Shemesh
outnumbered her detractors, and her rabbi expressed explicit support, Margolese
was deeply upset by the anger directed at her, and rarely left the house since
the incident, the source said.
She doesn’t see her move as a retreat, but an attempt do
what is best for herself and her family by seeking “peace of mind” elsewhere,
according to the source. Na’ama, she said, is very happy to make the move.
by Allison Kaplan Sommer
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