Invisible Women in israel

  It appears that graphic artists and public relations professionals in Jerusalem have recently developed a fetish for shoes. A glance at billboards and posters pasted around the city shows that Jerusalem is draped in shoes.

In Jerusalem, a shoe is not just a shoe, says Uri Ayalon, a Conservative rabbi who promotes religious pluralism, and who recently established an uncensored Facebook group that protests against the elimination of women from public spaces. Shoe images, he says, are used to obscure the fact that in Jerusalem women are rarely pictured on public posters and billboards.

It takes time to grasp that something is missing in public spaces in Israel's capital. But once you notice it, it's hard to fathom how you didn't pay attention to this fact earlier. It appears that in recent years, and in an escalated fashion in the past several months, women have disappeared from advertisements in Jerusalem.

This fact does not refer to scantily clad models, who were purged from signs and posters in the city several years ago as a result of campaigns waged by the ultra-Orthodox - struggles that sometimes included the burning and destruction of billboards and bus stops. The purging of women from publicly displayed pictures in Jerusalem applies to images of females in regular dress and daily situations. Pictures of women in family settings and advertisements of women using face cream or being connected to food or fashion products are hard to come by in this city.

Jerusalem municipality officials adamantly deny that there has been a change in the city's advertising policy, and they refer to several advertising campaigns that featured images of women. However, figures in the city's public relations industry admit that women have been entirely removed from public billboards and pictorial advertisements.

It seems that this trend is being led by private advertisers who prefer to conceal women rather than deal with ultra-Orthodox anger. For instance, a hamburger company that promoted its product around the country with a picture of happy family members choose in Jerusalem to show only images of its burgers. In Jerusalem, a campaign for regional radio stations dropped the image of radio presenter Ofira Asayag, which was featured everywhere else in the country.

This becomes a process of self-censorship, explains Rabbi Ayalon. You decide in advance not to use a photograph of a female dancer, so that nobody sprays it. You decide not to confront anything, and that's the position adopted by the advertisement agencies.

Six women met in Jerusalem to be photographed so their pictures can be hung from balconies throughout the city to counteract what appears to be the attempt to keep women out of advertising in the capital.

A group that calls itself Yerushalmim ( Jerusalemites ) and focuses on issues of pluralism is behind the initiative.

The idea is to return the city space to its natural state and turn the appearance of women into something boring, that no one notices, one of the originators of the idea, Rabbi Uri Ayalon, a Conservative rabbi who created a Facebook page called uncensored, through which the women signed up to be photographed.

The six volunteers met at the Jerusalem home of activist Shira Katz-Winkler. One of them, Idit Karni, says: A minority can't take over the city and cause women and girls to disappear. I have four daughters, and I don't intend to leave them a city that has lost its sanity.

Another of the volunteers, Tzafira Stern-Asal who is the director of a dance school, says she has had personal experience with the difficulty of putting women in advertising in the capital when trying to advertise her school. I finally had to limit myself to a shoe or some sort of fluttering material, which certainly reduces the attraction of the ad, she says.

In the first phase of the project, 100 posters of the women will be hung throughout the city, focusing on the downtown area.

The women believe the problem lies with advertisers, who self-censor out of fear of the ultra-Orthodox. Now we'll see the skies won't fall. I don't say it will pass quietly, but people will breathe easier when they see pictures of women returning to billboards.

Jerusalem's secular mayor, Nir Barkat, has pitted himself against the city's swelling ranks of ultra-orthodox extremists by demanding that local police enable women to reclaim their position in the public domain.

Over recent months, women's faces have disappeared from billboards across the city amid mounting pressure applied by the powerful ultra-orthodox lobby, who find the female image offensive.

Advertisers that do not fall in line with the standards of the extreme ultra-orthodox have frequently fallen victim to direct action. Across Jerusalem, female figures have been blacked out of billboards with spray-paint, or vandalised with graffiti branding the image illegal . Other posters are simply torn down.

On Sunday, Barkat wrote a letter to district police commander Niso Shaham in which he said: We must make sure that those who want to advertise [with] women's images in the city can do so without fear of vandalism and defacement of billboards or buses showing women.

The battle over Jerusalem's billboards is only one manifestation of an alarming trend towards gender segregation across Israel driven by the religious right. Activist Hila Benyovich-Hoffman was spurred to take action by reports that nine male cadets in the Israeli Defence Force had walked out of an army event in September because women were singing. Four were expelled from an officer's training course for refusing to apologise. Benyovich-Hoffman said:

This was the final straw for me, that these cadets could humiliate female soldiers because some rabbi has told them that a woman's voice is indecent. The army used to be a source of pride because women served alongside men as equals. But more and more, rabbis are influencing army behaviour.

She organised a series of demonstrations last Friday in which hundreds of women gathered for singalongs in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Beersheva to demand their right to a public presence. She says much more needs to be done.

The Press Complaints Commission has rejected claims that a Jewish Chronicle (JC) column by Professor Geoffrey Alderman breached accuracy and discrimination rules.

His article about the segregation of men and women, published on October 29 2011, included the claim that it is well known that Charedi men are notorious harassers of the opposite sex .

According to one complainant the reference could not be substantiated and was inaccurate. But the PCC found that because the column was written from Professor Alderman's perspective, it was clear to readers that the content reflected his views and experiences.

The PCC also cleared the JC over the claim that it was discriminatory to suggest that Charedim were notorious for committing such acts . Chris Paget, a complaints officer at the PCC said:

The article did not make a prejudicial or pejorative reference to the religion of a particular individual, but rather expressed the columnist's views on Charedi men in general.

To come to an inevitably subjective judgment as to whether such material is tasteless or offensive would amount to the Commission acting as a moral arbiter, which can lead to censorship.

Two actresses have censored from advertisements for the Israeli movie The Dealers , displayed on billboards in Jerusalem.

Other ads for the film, a comedy about friends from Jerusalem looking for a way to make money, feature four men and two women.

As a result of the exclusion, some protesters have threatened to boycott the movie. Critical comments posted on the Facebook page of film distributor United King Films included:

The movie is boycotted until you fix the advertising in Jerusalem

If you continue to exclude women, we will exclude ourselves from your movies!

United King said the company that operates the billboards had asked for the actresses to be removed from the ad:

Unfortunately, the censorship of women's images from billboards is the result of a decision we consider unacceptable, and is not in our interest. In the past two years we have unsuccessfully struggled against this unacceptable directive.

Previously the Jerusalem International Film Festival, held earlier this month, had its posters defaced all around the city after choosing a woman on a bicycle as its symbol. Many in Israel's secular majority, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, have reacted indignantly. In a Haaretz article a PR person is quoted as saying:

It is not surprising that the middle class and young secular people are abandoning Jerusalem. What remains of this charming city that should have been a magnificent city is injustice and dreariness and the repression of women.

The special Passover holiday supplement of the haredi newspaper BaKehillah blurred out Jewish women's faces in the iconic photograph of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising.

In BaKehillah's version of the photograph, all the faces of the women and girls are blurred out, and the little girl in the front left of the original photo is completely cropped out.

BaKehillah's editor responded to questions about the censorship by acknowledging it was done for modesty reasons. Avraham Dov Greenbaum told Ynet:

We honor the memory of the martyrs of the Holocaust, and unlike [you in the secular press] - respect our readers and bring them only what they need and want to see.