Word: shearim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Shabbes." In Jerusalem each Friday afternoon, as the sun dips behind the old, whitish buildings and the Sabbath begins with the sound of a horn, black-coated men with beards and side curls scurry through the orthodox Jewish district known as Mea Shearim (Hundred Gates) to roll heavy stones across the entrances to the quarter. Thus they make sure that for the next 24 hours-until the first three stars are visible on Saturday night-there will be no profanation of their self-imposed "ghetto" by "heathen" Jews who do not observe the Sabbath. No one smokes or turns...
Behind the forbidding stone walls of Jerusalem's Mea Shearim quarter, hundreds of bearded, ultra-Orthodox scholars study the Torah from morning to night, and wear the fur-trimmed black hats, ankle-length gaberdines and dangling ear-locks of the medieval ghettos. On the Sabbath, the more violent among them have stoned and burned moving vehicles and shattered the windows of homes where radios were playing. The rules of the Torah and the Rabbinate strictly circumscribe the lives of their womenfolk, who must not sit with men, must cover themselves to ankle and wrist. After a rudimentary schooling...
...rabbis of the Mea Shearim told their congregations nothing of these compromises. At rallies of the extreme Orthodox, zealots cried that the army was preparing to stock houses of ill-fame with Orthodox girls. On the whitewashed walls of the quarters, posters appeared: "Daughters of Israel Must Prefer the Stake to Conscription." Yielding to pressure, Rabbi Herzog reversed himself, proclaimed that conscription of females would violate Jewish...
...last week, as the Knesset debated the bill, 10,000 Orthodox Jews from the Mea Shearim and from all over Israel converged on Shaarei Hessed Square in the biggest anti-government demonstration in Israel's troubled history. Red-eyed from weeping, they swayed and wailed, prayed, and blew upon the ram's horn, a signal of national distress. Despite their prayers, the conscription bill passed the first Knesset reading...