Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jewish fathers were yesterday spending their first morning in jail for defying a school integration ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, a day after massive protests.
However, 22 mothers of pupils at an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in a West Bank settlement were given a stay of arrest while the court met yesterday morning to hear a plea to let them stay at home to care for their young families.
“We shall wait for the court’s decision before taking any action,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told reporters.
Israeli media said that some of the mothers were pregnant, while others had children with special needs. Ultra-Orthodox families generally have large families, far above the average of the secular Israeli population.
The media said a confrontation with the parents’ many supporters was likely if police sought to arrest the women.
Around 100,000 angry ultra-Orthodox Jews rallied in Jerusalem on Thursday in protest at the court’s decision to jail a group of parents of European origin, or Ashkenazis, for refusing to send their daughters to a school with Jewish girls whose families originate from Arab countries, known as Sephardis.
The 35 fathers who turned themselves in at Jerusalem police headquarters on Thursday evening were taken to Maasiyahu prison in the central Israeli city of Ramle to serve an initial two-week jail sentence for contempt of court.
The issue erupted when the Supreme Court intervened in a dispute at the ultra-Orthodox school in Immanuel settlement, where parents from the strictly observant Slonim Hassidic sect refused to let their girls attend classes with girls of Sephardi descent.
The court had given the parents until Wednesday to send their children back to school or be imprisoned for contempt of court. The parents refused.
Jerusalem city councilor Yossi Deitch, himself a Slonim Hassid, said the women had gone with their men to Jerusalem police, intending to be taken into custody, but had broken down at the moment of separation from their children.
“Parting really was hard, it was hard for everybody present,” he told public radio. “Some mothers, a certain number of mothers had an emotional breakdown and did not give themselves up.”
Deitch said police had been informed of the situation and lawyers launched an appeal to the court to stay the women’s arrests. He denied earlier media reports that police had launched a search for the mothers.
“Nobody went missing, nobody is in hiding. Everything was done in coordination” with the police, he said.
Rosenfeld said, however, that four fathers were still unaccounted for and subject to arrest unless the court ruled otherwise.
The parents say their stance is not based on racism or ethnicity, but is about differences in religious observance between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions.
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