Fearing religious takeover, activists see ‘secular awakening’ in Yom Kippur fray

For three years, the organizers of Yom Kippur street prayers at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square characterized the services as a moment in which both secular and religious people could unite around Judaism’s holiest day.

This year saw that thesis shattered, however, as the recent tradition — which started in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic moved prayers outdoors — descended into a shouting and shoving match over organizers’ insistence on placing a divider between the sexes, as required by Jewish Orthodox law, and a refusal by the municipality and secularist protesters to accommodate what they saw as gender-based discrimination in any way on public ground.

The scenes were unprecedented and are already being seen as a watershed moment in the fraught relationship between secularists and religious Jews in Israel, redrawing the borders of acceptable behavior on both sides of the divide. READ MORE