Jews of the Diaspora Bring Their Cause to the Israeli Public
Yet rather than ratcheting up the name-calling war with Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Rabbi Jacobs and other leaders of the Jewish Agency of Israel — a group
that supports Jewish diversity and inclusion and that helped negotiate the Western Wall agreement — now say they are embarking on an ambitious campaign to influence public opinion about the needs of diaspora and less-religious Jews where they are understood least, and where their political clout is feeblest: in Israel itself.
In a meeting at Robinson’s Arch on Monday, Tzachi Hanegbi, a minister without portfolio in Mr. Netanyahu’s government, assured leaders of the Jewish Agency
that plans were continuing to improve the prayer space, and he said that management of it would be entrusted to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which he said could be trusted to treat all branches of Judaism fairly.
30, 2017
JERUSALEM — In June, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel abruptly suspended a hard-won accord to give non-Orthodox Jewish men
and women a more dignified place to worship together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and then moved to bolster Orthodox control over conversions to Judaism in Israel, the backlash was swift and fierce.
Mr. Netanyahu accused the Reform movement, which has many adherents in the United States
but relatively few in Israel, of using the Western Wall agreement to gain recognition in the country"via the back door, secretly." Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders accused the prime minister of lying and trying to incite the ultra-Orthodox against them.
In the Old City on Monday, visiting leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements who had pressed for the changes at the Western Wall could do little more than fume, as a minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s government described for them a weak consolation prize: minor improvements to the tucked-away space where mixed-gender prayer has long been confined, largely unseen and all
but undiscoverable to those who are not specifically looking for it.
Israeli said that So we’re doing a lot of other work to make Israeli society know this problem better.
On Tuesday, 120 of the group’s international board of governors plan to descend on the Knesset, meeting with dozens of Israeli legislators, including some members of the ultra-Orthodox parties, in what Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who leads the Jewish Agency, called "our biggest lobbying effort ever." "The problem is not just
that the prime minister gave in to political pressure," he said in an interview.
