JERUSALEM: Dozens of Israeli men were in jail on Friday a day after ultra-Orthodox Jews staged their largest protest in 10 years in support of parents who defied a supreme court ruling on school integration.
But 22 mothers of pupils at an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in a West Bank settlement were given a stay of arrest while the court considered a plea to let them stay at home to care for their young families.
Settlers’ news website Channel 7 and public radio said Judge Edmund Levy decided that the court would reconvene on Sunday to discuss the request.
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.
"We shall wait for the court’s decision before taking any action," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.
The media reported that a confrontation with the parents’ many supporters would be 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.
It was the biggest demonstration by the ultra-Orthodox since February 1999 when at least 250,000 protesters declared their opposition to supreme court rulings challenging the Orthodox establishment’s monopoly on marriage, divorce and other religious and social issues.
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 court intervened in a dispute at the ultra-Orthodox school in Immanuel settlement, where parents from the strictly observant Slonim Hassidic sect of Ashkenazi Jewry 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 councillor 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 begun 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.
"Ashkenazi parents do not want their daughters to study with students who are less observant, who are likely to watch TV or the Internet. They want to protect their children from bad influences," said Meny Schwartz, the director of an ultra-Orthodox radio station.
