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Ultra-Orthodox men attacked a bus in Beit Shemesh, Israel after an Orthodox couple asked a woman to sit in the back.
A female passenger was told to move to the back of a crowded bus by an ultra-Orthodox couple—sparking a riot and confusion about who should be held responsible.
The couple asked the woman to move to preserve strict gender segregation rules followed by the Haredi Orthodox people in Beit Shemesh, a city near Jerusalem. The bus driver immediately alerted the police, an action that compelled at least four haredi men to block his vehicle’s path and start smashing its windows with a hammer.
“There were many women and children on board,” the bus driver told YNetNews. “I tried to drive forward a little to scare them. After a few seconds they moved and we continued on our way.”
But the damage was already done.
ynetnews.com
The protesters blocked the bus driver’s path and attacked his vehicle with a hammer.
Video of the bus shows holes in the windshield, a completely cracked front door, and glass shattered on the bus seats.
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At least three other public buses were stoned after the trouble started Wednesday afternoon.
Israel’s Transportation Ministry permits voluntary segregation, but prevents riders from forcing people to comply, JTA reports.
Ronen Zvulun/REUTERS
Israeli women ride on a bus used mainly by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, during a protest in January 2012 against Jewish zealots trying to enforce gender separation in public places.
A spokesman told the Jerusalem Post that the Egged bus company takes discrimination against women very seriously, adding that the perpetrators were members of an “extreme haredi group.”
Police have taken an Israeli couple into custody after the incident.
But the woman who was moved, an American who had recently relocated to Israel, seemed to disapprove of the arrest. She told YNetNews that the police “were making a big deal out of nothing.”
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Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
Women sit at the back of a bus on December 25, 2011 in Beit Shemesh, Israel.
“A woman came up to me and told me the bus was ‘kosher,'” the passenger said, “and I told her I didn’t know what that meant. She said it’s customary for women to sit in the back of the bus, and I told her I had no problem with that, only that it’d be difficult to move with the kids and my bag. She offered to help me and we moved to the back.”
The passenger said that a few men on the bus seemed to provoke the bus driver into calling the police.
Beit Shemesh is no stranger to religious tension. The city is currently in the middle of a heated mayoral race. Two Modern Orthodox candidates are running against an incumbent haredi mayor.
The city has also been a place where women’s rights activists have collided with those seeking to live out the strict tenets of their faith. In 2011, an extremist faction of the haredi group spit on an 8-year-old Modern Orthodox girl who they claimed was walking to school wearing an immodest dress.
In 2012, an ultra-Orthodox man told Tanya Rosenbilt to move to the back of the bus. The woman, later nicknamed the “Israeli Rosa Parks,” refused to go. The man held the bus doors open for approximately 30 minutes in protest, Haaretz reports.
