Thousands of Orthodox UK Jews have signed a petition due to be presented to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Wednesday opposing plans to extend the space for egalitarian prayer at the Kotel.
Leaders of the Am Echad [One People] campaign, which has attracted around 150,000 signatories from the US and elsewhere, are due to meet other Israeli politicians including Defence Minister Benny Gantz, Diaspora Affairs Minister Nathan Shai and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the next 24 hours.
Arrangements at the Western Wall have long been a bone of contention among Reform and Conservative Jews in particular.
Six years ago Mr Netanyahu’s government approved a compromise, in which the egalitarian prayer space in the southern part of the wall would be expanded and become accessible from the main plaza.
But the plan has remained stalled, even though Mr Bennett’s government, which came to power last summer, initially supported it.
The Am Echad delegation now in Israel to lobby for the status quo includes the chief executive of the Federation of Synagogues from the UK, Rabbi Avi Lazarus, and Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag from Manchester.
“We wanted to mobilise that considerable part of diaspora Jewry that is opposed to [the change], said Rabbi Guttentag, who helped to gather the 4,800 plus signatures from the UK.
He was asked to become involved by Rabbi Pesach Lerner, the American-based leader of Eretz Hakodesh, a small Orthodox faction at the World Zionist Congress.
Strong support for the Am Echad campaign has come from Rabbi Avrohom Gurwicz, the influential head of Gateshead Yeshivah.
In a letter, he spoke of the unifying effect of the remnant of the Temple compound, which “in the course of thousands of years was the place where the hearts of the tens of thousands of Jewish people gathered to pray together, in the manner which was handed down to us from one generation to the next”.
It was, he wrote, “a matter of great distress for us that particularly that location, should become a place of division of the hearts, and that location should be turned into a place of ‘strange worship’”.
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