Women of the Wall (WOW) is an international community of women who, since 1988, have sought the freedom to conduct women-led Torah services in the women’s section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. WOW’s legal claims and political strategies raise questions about women’s rights to equality within Judaism and under Israeli law, the nature of religious toleration for non-Orthodox Jewish movements, and Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state.
Gabriela Shalev, one of the outstanding Israeli academicians in the field of law, has instructed innumerable students in the intricacies of contract law, on which she has published and lectured in the light of her own analyses and theories.
Although women constitute a large portion of those who work in the Israeli legal field, women in law mostly have refrained from feminist identification, and feminist activism has been promoted by only a tiny minority of women lawyers.
Yehudit Karp is widely acknowledged for her determined pursuit of truth and justice. Throughout her career as a lawyer, she has acted with grit in the Israeli and international spheres, to preserve moral standards and to ensure human rights in general and women’s, children’s, and victim’s rights in particular.
Although the principles of equality for women under the Declaration of Independence and the Women’s Equal Rights Law were not endowed with constitutional force, and the 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty does not expressly include the principle of equality, these laws have been interpreted by the courts as securing the principle of gender equality as a basic principle of the legal system.
Ruth Ben Israel was an Israeli legal scholar who specialized in labor law, social equality, and women’s legal rights. While a member of Tel Aviv University’s law faculty from 1986 until her retirement in 2005, Ben Israel wrote more than fifteen influential books on labor law and served as a legal advisor to multiple Knesset Committees related to labor and women’s rights.