The room is partitioned with a lace
mechitza separating the women from the men.
From photographs that they published after the fact, he said, it turns out that they took a Torah scroll and unwound it completely, from Bereshit to the final verse, and "used it as a kind of '
mechitza', with men and women going up to the Torah and hugging it, touching it...
Also, since Orthodox women are obliged to sit separately (and often behind a
mechitza, or divider), if you're female you often can't even see what's going on very well.
These buses adhere to rules and customs not generally found on curbside carriers, from a
mechitza down the middle separating men and women, to prohibiting chametz on Passover.
He contributed to the Lambda Award-winning anthology Balancing on the
Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community, and on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's LGBT Advisory Committee he headed up groundbreaking research on the impact of bisexual invisibility.
Womenfolk above, the menschs below--the women can't complain: it's all ritual, no one's fault, merely a gesture to what, who remembers; the women disappearing behind the
mechitza, then peeking out, disappearing again.
Though the word hijab derives from the Arabic word for "barrier" or "veil" (Bouselmati 2002; Debray 2004; Vianes 2004) and its primary reference is to the curtain that separates men and women in prayer; like the
mechitza in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, a hijab is a type of kerchief and not a veil, though revealingly the debate in France focused on the le voule (veil) when referring explicitly to the hijab (Zouari 2002; 2004).
He regards the Orthodox Jewish women of his childhood synagogue, segregated behind the
mechitza, as teachers of authentic emotion, and the
mechitza itself as a barrier stultifying to both women and men:
So I operate largely with a
mechitza, to use the Hebrew term, a barrier.
Continue reading "Singing Out Loud: An Elementary School Rebellion at the
Mechitza" at...
As the most sacred space in Judaism, the Wall is under the zealous supervision of Orthodox Jews, which means that, like everything else in Orthodox Judaism, it is divided into a male part and a female part, with a
mechitza, a physical divider separating men from women, running down the middle.