Women of the Wall's Anat Hoffman, wired to fight for pluralism

The sun and beach of Haifa’s Bat Galim neighborhood have been good for Anat Hoffman, iconic co-founder and chairwoman of the board of Women of the Wall (WoW), who moved there two years ago with her partner of 14 years. 

But she is on her way to the Yitzhak Navon Train Station by foot – since the roads are closed for the parade – and will soon be back in Haifa, where the golden-domed Baha’i Temple graces the skyline and “the Mediterranean Sea licks the city at the foot of the Carmel” a mere two hours yet a world away from Jerusalem, where she was born and where her grandparents founded Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. 

Following their megillah reading – usually one of the WoW’s least controversial readings – the 14 women who had come to read and hear the megillah on the gray and cloudy morning of March 25 recited a prayer for the quick return of the hostages. 

This, Hoffman’s 35th megillah reading with WoW – the multi-denominational feminist organization she helped found to secure women’s rights to pray at the Western Wall – also marks her upcoming 70th birthday, on April 2, and celebrates WoW’s three and a half decades in action.

“The happiness muscle is not working this morning, much as I try. And there are different texts that say that even at the worst time, you have to work that muscle. I am unable to work this muscle, not this year,” she says, over a mug of sahlav at a favorite cafe in downtown Jerusalem. Hoffman is as quick to compliment the kitchen staff for their excellent execution of the thick, hot milky, orchid-flavored drink topped with nuts and cinnamon as she is to ask a woman soldier to turn down the volume on the Zoom call she is conducting at the next table sans earphones. 

Finding a pluralistic, tolerant community in Haifa

Hoffman moved to Haifa not just because of her relationship with a native of the northern mixed Arab-Jewish city but also because, she says, she found a community where racism, ethnocentrism, and chauvinism are not an everyday, minute-by-minute occurrence. Many of her neighbors are also former Jerusalemites. The desire to move grew gradually, she said, due to many things – everyday scenes of covert or overt racism; of Arabs being stopped in the street for identity checks. For example, she says, sometimes when a policeman or policewoman stops an Arab in the street, it is not just for security concerns but out of territoriality.

“Israel has a right to defend herself. I think that is legitimat.e and I support that,” she says. 

“But it is all around us and we just don’t see it. Okay, so someone reading this will say: ‘Oh, the bleeding-heart leftist. What does she want? For a terrorist to kill us?’ No, I don’t. But I don’t want us to stop being human. 

“And even though I fully understand the reasons for it, sometimes that woman soldier with the gun stops being human, oversteps the mark. She’s not there just to check this guy out [for security purposes]. She’s also there to give him a message. And that doesn’t happen in Haifa.”

In Jerusalem, she had the dilemma of whether to speak out at every turn or keep her thoughts to herself, she says.

“Should I say something, and then I’m branded, or do I keep quiet? Keeping quiet makes me ill,” she says. “And in Haifa, I don’t need to do that. It’s not that in Jerusalem there aren’t wonderful initiatives; Arabs and Jews still trying, especially women’s circles.”

She explains that in Haifa, where languages and ethnicities intermingle, it is simply easier to be a leftist and a feminist. It’s also easier to be a person of color or LGBTQ, she says.“Haifa is also not consumed with the rhetoric of how holy she is and how united she is because that rhetoric [in Jerusalem]... really flies in the face of what you see outside.”

Retired life 

Now officially retired from her role as executive director of the Israel Religious Action Committee, Hoffman spends time walking along the beach promenade near her home, cooking three spectacular meals a day, and writing – she handwrites letters and mails them “with a stamp” to 18 people on a regular basis, as well as sending a weekly letter to each of her children. (She also still keeps the over 1,600 letters exchanged with her grandfather when she was studying abroad in the early 1970s). 

Hoffman clasps her hands to her heart, and a look of pure joy comes over her face as she reveals that her children have told her that they keep her letters – which include sketches and drawings and random pieces of information about her daily doings – in a container next to their front doors that they can grab quickly in case of a fire that would necessitate evacuating their homes.

She has handwritten and illustrated a book for her 10-year-old granddaughter in London who is the hero of the story, saving animals in the city. Hoffman is also currently writing what may turn out to be a comedic musical about the WoW – including the time a policeman prohibited them from putting a tallit on a snow-woman they had made next to the Wall one snowy Jerusalem when celebrating Rosh Hodesh – the beginning of a new Hebrew month.  

Hoffman still travels to Jerusalem at least once a month – including every Rosh Hodesh – to take part in the Torah readings by the WoW at the Western Wall, sometimes getting up as early as 4 a.m. to make it to Jerusalem for 7 a.m. 

Continuing the fight for Women of the Wall

“I may have concluded my chapter of fighting for a pluralistic Jerusalem, but I certainly have not scaled down my work with Women of the Wall,” she says. “I am still very much the active chair of Women of the Wall, and I am working with [executive director] Yochi Rappaport and have great hopes for this group,” Hoffman says. 

“If it weren’t for us, some of the women who attack us at the Wall, who say Kaddish and pray out loud and dance, would not be able to do those things. Praying out loud for women was considered ‘against local custom and offending the feelings of others.’ Now those women can sing out loud and dance and say Kaddish, and then they attack WoW for being a ‘finger in the eye,’ without even realizing “that they are able to do these activities because of the struggle of the Women of the Wall.”

In response to a 1993 WoW petition to the Supreme Court to be allowed to pray and read the Torah by the Wall, an amendment was added to the Regulations for the Protection of the Holy Places to the Jews which prohibited the conducting of any religious service at the Western Wall “not in conformance with the local custom or that violates the feeling of the worshipers in regard to that place.” 

Without mentioning women, it effectively criminalized with a threat of six months’ jail time anyone who carried out WoW’s four strategic “T” goals: Torah reading; tefila (praying) out loud; wearing a tallit; and donning tefillin. 

“All these four were criminalized by the state. When men don tefillin, it is not against local custom and not offensive, so without saying “women” it was against women,” says Hoffman. “We made it impossible for them to implement the six-month sentence.”

The outcry in both Israel and abroad against the new amendment so was immense, she says, that they made it impossible for the government to implement the six-month sentence punishment, and three of the four “T”s are now legal. Only the reading of the Torah remains illegal. 

Fighting to make Jerusalem more pluralistic

Hoffman has spent a good part of her adult life trying to make Jerusalem more pluralistic, more tolerant, and more equal, she says. In 1989 she ran for and won a seat on the Jerusalem City Council and was in the opposition for 14 years as she and her then-husband were raising their three children, starting the trajectory of what she calls her “life’s vocation.” Her disillusionment with Jerusalem began gradually as she started to see that the things she had been fighting for, such as equality and pluralism, were no longer even a priority for the city council. Still, she had no choice but to fight for her pluralistic and democratic values, she says.

What happens at the Western Wall is a microcosm of the entire problem of Jerusalem, she explains. 

“The keys to the Wall were given to the most zealot, extremist, ultra-Orthodox group in Judaism,” Hoffman charges, noting that in his 2009 book on laws and traditions of the Western Wall, the Rabbi of the Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, did not include any photographs of women in the several hundred-page tome and mentions women only twice: once to say that menstruating women should not touch the Wall, and secondly that they should avert their eyes from the Torah when it is raised in the men’s section for everyone to see.   

“There is more written about what to do with your snot [than about women]. The idea that women are people has not yet penetrated,” Hoffman says. “He does everything he can to curtail, disrupt, and sabotage our ability to hold a prayer together at the Wall.”

Reaching about 1,000 in number – including those abroad – WoW may not be given the recognition they deserve but, says Hoffman, they have contributed “something extraordinary” to Israel. 

WoW have demonstrated that they can run a multi-denomination prayer group with Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist participants; construct a prayer book for all members to read from the same text; and break down the divisions between Israeli women and Jewish women abroad – and now even some men have been joining their group, including some of the original paratroopers who were the first to reach the Western Wall in the Six Day War.

“Some say it is such a little group and such a little cause. To those people I say they have obviously never spent the night in a room with a mosquito,” says Hoffman. “It is a very worthwhile struggle because we are asking who Judaism belongs to and what kind of Judaism we want in this country.”

Seventieth birthday celebration

As part of her 70th birthday celebrations, Hoffman has asked each of her children – one of whom lives in London and is father to her only granddaughter – to give her the gift of teaching her something she does not know that they think she should know and sharing a good meal with her. 

Her other celebration will include seven-minute conversations with some of the most active women of WoW, including members living abroad and original founders of the group. They are now in the process of arranging conversations with dozens of women who are eager for the opportunity.

While in her view the situation in Jerusalem is deteriorating, she does not regret having fought the good fight.

“I am wired to fight for these values, and I would have been miserable if I didn’t have the opportunity,” she says. 

“I think I helped delay some of these phenomena, and there is still a fingerprint of mine in this town. But I think the Jerusalemites who continue to fight for a pluralistic Jerusalem are righteous people, really. I have resilience and I have tenacity, but I’m afraid that the ultra-Orthodox majority in the city council is going to have to reap the consequences of their own decisions of their lifestyle, which will be bankruptcy. 

“The more Israelis like me who leave, the more the productive element of Jerusalem will become smaller. Who will pay for the education of all these children?”Jerusalem is Israel’s largest city, with 10% of the country’s population, she says, and this is where redemption will have to come from. 

“That is, the ultra-Orthodox will have to change. I am not saying they will have to become secular, but they’re going to have to become a productive element of society as they are in Belgium, in New York, and everywhere else,” she says. 

“I am not hopeless about Jerusalem. If you’re asking me specifically where the hope will come from, it will come from young ultra-Orthodox women. I think ultra-Orthodox women are going to figure out that education is important to them. 

“The revolution will come from young Orthodox women who will start asking the most subversive question in Judaism: “Why not?” And some will have been inspired by Women of the Wall.”

On the cusp

The First Temple lasted 80 years, the Second Temple lasted 80 years, and Israel will be celebrating its 76th Independence Day in May, she notes.

“We are on the cusp of [having to change] how we run our affairs from the very foundation, or pay the ultimate price. We can’t continue this way. It is unsustainable,” she says.

 She looks toward Diaspora Jewry as a source of inspiration and a way of saving Israel from itself. Raised completely secular, Hoffman admires Diaspora Jews. In 1974, after her IDF service, she attended UCLA to study for her undergraduate degree in psychology, where she was introduced to a pluralistic form of Judaism that resonated with her and still inspires her. Many WoW members live abroad.

“They will make us swallow some bitter medicine. I am not in despair... I am just saying it will be a bitter pill to swallow for Jerusalem to become a true capital of the Jewish state like we had in 1948,” she acknowledges. 

“I think Israel is way too important to be left to Israelis.”

Her words are hard, the reality she describes discouraging for her, and yet she smiles. A phone call from her partner waiting for her in Haifa concludes with her telling him she loves him and him telling her he is crazy about her.

“I fought a good fight,” she says, preparing to leave the café. “Now I am seeing my life’s work at its lowest point. I met such good people along the way, and I’m trying to hold on to the faith that we can do the hard thing and change.

“Because if we don’t change direction,” she says, quoting Chinese philosopher Lao Tse, “we will end up going where we are headed.”