The Chief Rabbinate and the Religious Services Ministry have
issued new instructions that are intended to put an end to a recurrent problem
at certain mivkehs (ritual baths) around the country: intrusive questioning by
mikveh attendants of women who come there to immerse themselves.
In letter sent to mikveh attendants this week, Chief
Sephardi Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef wrote that they can offer women “assistance and
explanations” on matters of Jewish law, but if a woman refuses this assistance,
“the attendant must not interrogate and examine her against her will and must
enable her to immerse herself without any demands or interrogation (especially
when this could cause the woman in question not to want to continue immersing
herself next time.)” Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau issued a similar letter,
urging attendants “not to be hard on” women who use the mikveh.
The Religious Services Ministry plans to circulate similar,
binding instructions to all public mikvehs.
The new instructions were drafted in response to numerous
complaints by women that were forwarded by ITIM, an organization which helps
people navigate the religious bureaucracy.
Jewish law requires women who have sexual relations to
immerse themselves in the mikveh after their periods, but it also sets various
requirements for how long they must wait after their periods end and what
preparations they must make before immersing themselves, such as combing their
hair and removing any bandages.
The complaints said that mikveh attendants
often asked intrusive and offensive personal questions on these issues – not as
a matter of official policy, but rather because there was no official policy
dictating rules of proper conduct for the attendants.
One particularly egregious complaint that recently reached
the chief rabbis concerned a mikveh in Lod that posted a sign detailing all the
preparations necessary and warning that a full-body inspection, “both visual
and by touch,” must be performed “by both the immersing woman and the
attendant” to ensure these requirements had been met.
The High Court of Justice has also weighed in on the mikveh
issue. In May, responding to a petition by the Center for Women’s Justice, the
court said that mikveh attendants are not allowed to ask women whether they are
married or single or to bar single women from immersing themselves. Under
Jewish law, a woman is forbidden to have sex if she hasn’t immersed herself
after her period, so some attendants evidently thought keeping singles from
immersing was a way to keep them from having premarital sex.
Meanwhile, the Chief Rabbinate’s new instructions have
already sparked a mini-war among religious Knesset members over who gets credit
for persuading the rabbis to issue them. MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid), who
submitted a bill on the issue just last week, claimed that her bill was what
prompted the rabbis’ letter, while Deputy Religious Services Minister Eli Ben
Dahan (Habayit Hayehudi) claimed that he had personally reached an agreement
with the chief rabbis over this issue. Both also said they had been working on
the issue for months – a claim supported by ITIM in Lavie’s case and the Chief
Rabbinate in Ben Dahan’s case.
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