'Whose wall is it anyway?'

For centuries Jewish pilgrims have gathered at the Western Wall to lament the loss of their Second Temple and offer prayers of yearning in front of its ancient stones.

For the past 21 years, for an hour on the first day of each month of the Jewish calendar, Anat Hoffman and about 100 other women have gone to the site to pray and to challenge the ultra-Orthodox religious authorities who now control the holiest of Jewish historical sites.

Ms. Hoffman, a former Jerusalem city councillor, and her group, Women of the Wall, defy Orthodox Jewish customs as they pray and sing loudly in front of the Wall's coarse white limestone blocks. They wear multi-coloured prayer shawls and, one day last July, they dared to parade with a rolled up Torah scroll.

That resulted in Ms. Hoffman being arrested, fined and barred from visiting the Wall for 30 days. She was also threatened with a possible three-year jail term.

Normally the women's attempts to pray before the Wall in exactly the same manner as men result in confrontations, in which ultra-Orthodox men, with their curly sidelocks, long coats and round box-like fur hats, shout curses and insults over a two-metre high partition separating the sexes.

Ultra-Orthodox custom demands women worshippers should be segregated from men and insists they pray in silence, lest they distract male worshippers.

But in Israel today those religious strictures are under attack by a more liberal and secular society that rejects the demands of ultra-Orthodox leaders and resents their religious fundamentalism.

"How is it that as Jewish women, we are free in Berlin, in Rome, in Chicago and Toronto, while in Jerusalem, it is illegal and profane for us to read from the Torah?" Ms. Hoffman said.

"At the Wall, the question is whose Wall is it anyway? Is it really the holiest place for all the Jewish people? If it is the holiest place for all the Jewish people, you can't silence half the population."

"You can't criminalize what I am doing because what I am doing is what the Jewish world is doing," she added.

"I am not the only woman wearing a tallith [prayer shawl] and holding a Torah scroll and praying out loud. I am one of many, many millions of women who are doing that. But in Israel, I am now facing criminal charges."

Ms. Hoffman, who will be in Toronto and Hamilton Sunday and Monday to speak at synagogues

and Jewish community centres, rails against ultra-Orthodox demands to exclude women from the public sphere for the sake of a religious lifestyle that is rejected by most Israelis.

As executive director of the Israel Religious Action Centre (IRAC), the legal advocacy arm of the Reform Movement in Israel, she was instrumental in winning a partial court victory last week to desegregate more than 100 public bus routes in Israel, on which women had been forced to ride in the back, while men sat in the front.

Israel's high court ruled the enforced segregation was illegal, but said the practice could continue by consent.

As a result, the IRAC is about to launch a year-long Rosa Parks-inspired Freedom Rider program in which foreign and local female volunteers will attempt to sit in the front seats of the "modesty buses."

The group also intends to continue to challenge the expansion of sexually segregated post offices, banks, health-care centres, police stations, pharmacies, supermarkets, elevators, cemeteries and schools.

"Jewish tradition is one of the wonderful reasons for the existence of Israel," Ms. Hoffman said.

"We are probably the only state in the world born of a dream -- a dream of how people with values can run their own sovereign state according to those values. We did not rely on a geopolitical decision or some evolution of history, we were born of a dream.

"The big challenge of Israel now is how and who decides what are Jewish values. This is probably the most important discourse in the Jewish world today. What is the face of the state of Israel? What kind of state is it going to be?"

Twenty-one years ago, Ms. Hoffman and the Women of the Wall petitioned Israel's Supreme Court for the right to worship at the Wall like Orthodox Jewish men. But it wasn't until 2003 the court ruled that while women may pray in groups at the Wall, they should neither wear the traditional prayer shawl nor read directly from the Torah.

Instead, they were ordered to hold their main prayer services in a corner next to Robinson's Arch, a monument in an archeological garden just out of view of the Wall.

In 2005, Israel's parliament passed a law saying anyone who offends traditional custom at the Western Wall, including women who wrap themselves in prayer shawls, may be jailed for up to six months or fined up to 10,000 shekels (about $2,800).

"As a place dear to the heart of every Jew, every movement and every world view, the Western Wall must remain a place that unifies rather than separates the people of Israel," said Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the religious official who oversees the Western Wall and Israel's other holy sites.

"The different movements need to understand the complexity and sensitivity of the Western Wall and not turn it into a place of argument and conflict."

But Ms. Hoffman insists the fight to expand women's prayer rights at the site is symptomatic of the growing conflict over the power and religious authority of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders.

"Why did we give the keys to Judaism to one stream of Judaism?" she said.

"I think when you put state finance and state resources and state power behind one strain or religion, you are actually corrupting Orthodoxy and corrupting Judaism and corrupting Israel.

"What we have is a huge government structured supermarket with only one product on the shelf and that particular product -- Orthodoxy, Israeli style -- has been rejected by many, if not the majority of Israelis.

"Most Israelis have given up the Wall for gone," she added.

"They think it is an Orthodox synagogue. They don't even come to the Wall. Even the paratroopers who fought and won the Wall back for Israel say to me, 'It is no longer home for us.' It is a home for the Orthodox, segregated between men and women, with a variety of superstitious habits and regulations."

Still, she insists women will soon be given the same rights to pray before the Wall as men.

"There will be a bat mitzvah at the Wall some day, no doubt," she said.