By Anat Tzruya | 08/07/2010
While doing research for a new movie, Anat Tzruya learned the intimate details of a lynch that took place on a "mehadrin" (super-kosher, with separate seating for men and women) bus in Beit Shemesh against a young 18-year-old religious woman, Oriyah Ferdheim, whose heinous sin was sitting in the men's section of the bus. To this day, the perpetrators of the assault have not been brought to justice.
Photo: Shulamit Wienfeld
Ironically, it was supposed to have been a festive day for Oriya Ferdheim. It was her first day in the National Service. When she alighted the bus in her neighborhood in the town of Beit Shemesh, en route to Yahud, and sat down in one of the chairs, a chair astoundingly similar to the dozens of others surrounding it, she had no conception of what was about to happen.
She was sleepy and turned on her mp3 so that she wouldn't fall asleep and miss her bus. Oriyah was lost in her dreams with her music on when she was jolted by the first kick. The kick was a direct hit to her leg, and when she looked up to see the source of the pain, she saw her assailants facing her: four ultra-Orthodox men, and a woman who over time would come to be known as the "rebbetzin," and they screamed "shikseh" at her and tried to tear her from her seat, all the while spitting on her, kicking her, and pelting her with all manner of objects.
Nothing had prepared Oriyah for this attack. No detail in what had begun as a routine trip on an Egged bus in the heart of Israel foreshadowed the storm of rage and violence in which she would be caught. There were just five zealots, but they turned the routine trip of the passengers on Bus 497 from Beit Shemesh into a scene taken from some kind of zany action film, if one takes into account the ultra-Orthodox look of most of the bus's passengers. In the unbelievable end of the episode, five police cars and undercover police came to extricate the 18-year-old Oriyah and the soldier who tried to rescue her from the madding crowd, i.e. from the majority of the bus passengers and from the residents of the Ramat Beit Shemesh suburb who came to their succor.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At the beginning of the assault, the power relations were clear. Oriyah was one against five, and her five assailants screamed to the other passengers to help them drag her to the back of the bus. The entire time, the bus driver, an ultra-Orthodox man, did not heed Oriyah's cries and pleas for help. He ignored the violence and the jeered insults of "shikseh," "lewd," and "trespasser," and continued driving. At this stage of the tumult, Oriyah, who is from a religious home, succeeded in drawing the necessary conclusion. She understood why this was happening to her, what iniquity she had committed, of what sin she was guilty. She figured out that they were trying to harm her because she had mistakenly gotten onto a "mehadrin" bus, and situated herself in a forbidden place, in the men's section. On a "mehadrin" bus, women sit in the back, and she, Oriyah, unaware of the matter, had violated the "halakha" forbidding a woman from sitting at the front of the bus. Most grave of all, she refused to move to the women's realm, and for this she was severely punished, and would continue to be punished, no holds barred, without limit, as if she had landed in another country.
The Israeli Rosa Parks
I first met Oriyah, the Israeli Rosa Parks (Parks, an activist in the American Civil Rights Movement, was arrested in 1955 for sitting in a seat designated for "whites only" on a bus in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama; in response, a young preacher, Martin Luther King, boycotted the city bus company, and began his struggle for the achievement of equal rights for African Americans), in a café in Beit Shemesh, months after she was attacked. I had sought her out for a long time, and the meeting itself was made possible thanks to the detective work of Sigal Lansberg, the researcher and director of the new film I was working on, in which I examined the components of oppression that the religious / ultra-Orthodox modesty revolution imposes on religious women.
The lynching of Oriyah was carried out because she is a woman who refused to surrender to the ultra-Orthodox dictates of "modesty." The fact that an ultra-Orthodox crowd did not hesitate to so severely punish the anonymous young woman who publicly violated the rules of modesty aroused my curiosity regarding the nature of the event and her personality. What prompted the lynch? What does it symbolize? Could it be that the event, that left no impression on the Israeli public agenda, is also tied to the identity of its hero?
The process of locating Oriyah dragged on for a long time since the young woman was mistakenly described in the media as "an ultra-Orthodox woman" and because she refused to be exposed publicly. Almost a year passed and Oriyah still suffered from nightmares. She was afraid that the zealots of Beit Shemesh would locate her home and attack her again. Oriyah came to the first meeting accompanied by her mother. The two women, who appeared from their dress to belong to the right-wing-religious-Zionist stream, were amazingly different from one another. The mother, a gentle soul who had been through a complex divorce and "become more religious," herself had a difficult time understanding Oriyah's deed. She challenged Oriyah, trying to understand how it transpired that her intelligent and reasonable daughter had endangered herself in an impulsive manner, and for no ostensible reason. It was not clear to the mother for what value Oriyah had sacrificed herself, since the mother's worldview coincided with what is expected of a woman from Beit Shemesh. She herself identified with the position of those rabbis who stated that in the name of modesty, and because of the purity of the Jewish camp, women should be separated and excluded from the public space.
In Oriyah's biography there was therefore nothing that easily explained her behavior. She grew up in a religious home in Beit Shemesh and attended "Horev," a nearly ultra-Orthodox (Torani) girls' school in Jerusalem, known for its strict and oppressive approach. In her choice to leave the prestigious institution rather then remain there for high school, Oriyah exhibited a spark of natural rebellion. However, at the time our hero evinced no special feminist awareness, certainly not an awareness that could explain her uncompromising act of resistance that morning on the 497 bus line.
I tried to understand what went through the head of this girl who endangered her life. "It was dangerous, but they attacked me for no reason and humiliated me without restraint; I simply knew that I would never get up and give in to them," she said, without interpreting it during her reconstitution of the trauma. I asked Oriyah to describe in detail the abuse to which she was subject on that trip through the streets of Beit Shemesh. To a great extent, the young woman, like the incident, remain a mystery.
I continued meeting with Oriyah, trying to elicit from her a fuller chronology. Only after a few meetings did the description of the lynch attempt begin to come together: her bag, her glasses and additional items were grabbed from her, she was rained on by a slew of objects, and many of the bus's passengers joined the quintet of attackers. The shouts and screams, the spitting and the curses continued to escalate. Oriyah succeeded in calling the police a moment before her phone was also snatched. One police car arrived and stopped the bus. The police naively stopped the bus on the main road of Beit Shemesh, between two large yeshivas, a misstep that cost them dearly. A policeman got onto the bus and tried to calm the crowd. At that point, the five zealots escaped the bus. The blasé policeman, convinced that the attack was behind him, let Oriyah stay on the bus in the eye of the storm, on a chair that had become a symbol. He made it clear to the inflamed and incensed passengers that it was Oriyah's right to sit wherever she wanted, but a moment before getting off the bus, he cast her a worried glance and suggested that "she vacate her seat just for this ride, just this once!" Oriyah did not move.
Did she understand where she was headed? It's hard to say. A moment after the policeman got off the bus, the struggle resumed. And this time, residents of the entire ultra-Orthodox street ganged up against Oriyah. As if in a planned performance, dozens of ultra-Orthodox began streaming into the bus, whose doors had been opened by the ultra-Orthodox Egged driver. The five zealous assailants had apparently spread the word that Oriyah was supposedly desecrating Heaven, and the masses that penetrated the bus tried to rip her off her seat. A young soldier, also from Beit Shemesh, tried to act as a human barrier to protect Oriyah from the mad and violent crowd, in the stifling bus suddenly jammed with over one hundred people. Outside, hundreds of rioters gathered across from the bus and the police car. The policeman, who had been on his way to leave the site, called up numerous troops. The goal was clear: to extricate Oriyah and the soldier who was protecting her with his body.
The policemen who arrived on scene had a hard time controlling the masses, and at one stage, were even forced to shoot into the air. Ultimately, thanks to the temporary shock from the shooting, Oriyah and the soldier were evacuated and transferred to a safe spot in one of the police cars.
"I sat in the police car and I felt like a monkey in the zoo," Oriyah recalls. "The surrounding raging ultra-Orthodox men photographed me from every direction, as if I was a criminal whose memory must be forever publicly disgraced. I remained strong, but when I arrived at the police [station] and called my mother, the tears burst forth and I couldn't speak."
The Calm after the Storm
In all of my years working in film, I have never encountered such a case of violence, and therefore, I had a hard time believing that the responses to the event were so pathetic: the media made do with superficial coverage of the case, the politicians weren't concerned at all, the public did not protest, and the police left the assailants alone. While a description of the attack on Oriyah was published, along with inaccuracies, the various heroes of the story were not exposed.
No full testimony was taken from Oriyah Ferdheim; the testimony of the soldier who protected her with his body was not released to the public; no analysis of the lynch attempt was carried out, and its characteristics and implications for Israeli society were not investigated. The lynch attempt became just another incident in the wave of violent incidents associated with ultra-Orthodox extremists. It was as if the attack in Beit Shemesh melted into Israeli reality as a headline and brief news item, but not much more than that. The event took place in 2006 – today Oriyah is a law student. She has experienced a few more incidents of harassment in her travels on "mehadrin" buses, but none of them has come close to that of 2006. Oriyah's story was not documented, and her assailants were released; not long ago, she saw one of them roaming freely around Beit Shemesh.
What prevented the media from asking, documenting and investigating? Did the fact Oriyah was marked as ultra-Orthodox give the impression that the story was an internal ultra-Orthodox matter? Why are the police refraining from opening an investigation? And if the lynch attempt had occurred in a Druze village, would the assailants also not have been found?
Oriyah told me that at the Beit Shemesh police station, she was told that the assailants would never be located. She was exhausted but she spoke up. After all, she remembers their faces. Why, then, shouldn't they be punished? It was hinted to her that this is Israeli reality. That's the way things go. Even though I viewed Oriyah Ferdheim as an anonymous ultra-Orthodox hero, I ultimately chose not to include her testimony and additional testimonies of violence that take place in "mehadrin" busses precisely because she is not part of ultra-Orthodox society. In the movie "Shikseh," I chose to tell the story of violence perpetrated, uninhibited, within the ultra-Orthodox world and directed at "their" women; since there, behind the towering walls, the most extreme violence takes place, but, after all, it's an internal matter. In the multi-cultural Israeli atmosphere, who really cares about ultra-Orthodox women? Let the tribe take care of them in its own way, and based on the leadership of some Torah great, "without the High Court of Justice, and without B'Tselem."
Oriyah told me that at the Beit Shemesh police station, she was told that the assailants would never be located. She was exhausted but she spoke up. After all, she remembers their faces. Why, then, shouldn't they be punished? It was hinted to her that this is Israeli reality. That's the way things go. Even though I viewed Oriyah Ferdheim as an anonymous ultra-Orthodox hero, I ultimately chose not to include her testimony and additional testimonies of violence that take place in "mehadrin" busses precisely because she is not part of ultra-Orthodox society. In the movie "Shikseh," I chose to tell the story of violence perpetrated, uninhibited, within the ultra-Orthodox world and directed at "their" women; since there, behind the towering walls, the most extreme violence takes place, but, after all, it's an internal matter. In the multi-cultural Israeli atmosphere, who really cares about ultra-Orthodox women? Let the tribe take care of them in its own way, and based on the leadership of some Torah great, "without the High Court of Justice, and without B'Tselem."
