Pride and parking in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

June 14, 2009 - 7:55 AM by

In Tel Aviv, there were parades and celebrations. In Jerusalem, there was a protest demonstration. Just another typical weekend in Israel.

Meretz MK Nitsan Horowitz must have been the busiest guy in the country, as he managed to participate in both events – the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv on Friday, which this year, included the ‘weddings’ of five gay couples – and a Saturday protest in the capital by secular activists angered that the opening of a parking lot on Shabbat for Old City visitors was suspended due to riots the week before by haredi protestors.

Got that straight… um, clear?

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According to supporters between 20,000 and 30,000 participants took place in the Tel Aviv Gay Pride parade, culminating in the joint wedding ceremony on the beach (which can be viewed on the accompanying video).

Ha’aretz wrote:

The ceremony, held at sundown after a boisterous disco on the sand, began with a serenade by gay pop star Ivri Lider as the three female and two male same-sex couples walked up to the Chuppah, the Jewish wedding altar.

The ceremony was performed according to Jewish marriage rites, with each couple exchanging rings and Hebrew vows before breaking the traditional glass as the crowd erupted in applause.

Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz, the Knesset’s first openly gay parliamentarian, attended the wedding, along with Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai.

“I hope that from this day weddings like this can happen in every place in Israel and not just in Tel Aviv,” Horowitz told Haaretz. “Weddings for everyone – man and woman, man and man, and woman and woman, and this will be the end of the monopoly of the ultra-Orthodox over our lives in Israel.”

The parade was sponsored by Tel Aviv municipality as part of the city’s centennial celebrations. It was a far cry from the scene the next day in Jerusalem when several hundred people gathered in the Kikar Safra to protest what they called Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat’s “capitulation” to the city’s haredi community over the Shabbat operation of a municipal parking lot.

The mayor had opened the garage last weekend, with the approval of his haredi coalition partners. But the move prompted a riot by thousands of haredim, and more rioting had been threatened for Saturday if the lot were opened again.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Barkat, on Friday, acceded to a request from the city’s police chief to close the municipal garage for two successive Saturdays. The plan is to find an alternative site to during that time to accommodate parking for visitors to the nearby Old City.

“This is just a warm-up demonstration,” Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Pepe Allalo of Meretz told the crowd, estimated by the organizers at 800, who sang and chatted in the afternoon sunshine. “But if [Barkat] doesn’t reopen the garage in two weeks, we’ll fill the whole square.”

Some haredim, said Allalo, “want to turn Jerusalem into another Bnei Brak… We won’t let that happen.”

Barkat’s spokesman Evyatar Elad said that the parking lot would be reopened in two weeks if no solution to the lack of weekend parking near the Old City could be found by then.

MK Horowitz, fresh from the Tel Aviv celebration the day before, told the crowd that the dispute over the garage was “part of the wider struggle over the very nature of the State of Israel.

“If there is no freedom for secular Jerusalemites, in time there will no freedom for the secular residents of Tel Aviv or anywhere else,” he declared.

Later this month, all of the issues will gloriously converge like a master plan from above. Jerusalem is holding its own annual gay pride parade on June 25th. In the past, despite a much lower profile than Tel Aviv’s parade, there have several confrontations with haredim in Jerusalem, including violence and injuries resulting.

Which demonstration will the haredim choose to attend? The ‘close the parking lot’ or the ‘stop the gay pride parade’ protests? And just where will all the gay pride parade attendees park?

Stay tuned…

Tags: , , , , , • Category: A New Reality, coexistence, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

Comments

One Comment on Pride and parking in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

  1. Dan Elkayam on Sun, Jun 14th 2009 7:52 PM

    2. Why the scare quotes around ‘weddings’?

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