Burqamania!

Via the Daily Telegraph, a story that is fascinating on quite a number of levels. Here’s the key extract:

Israeli rabbis are to clamp down on the growing number of devout Jewish women wearing the burka by declaring the garment an item of sexual deviancy. At the insistence of the husbands of some burka-wearing women, a leading rabbinical authority is to issue an edict declaring burka wearing a sexual fetish that is as promiscuous as wearing too little.

A small group of ultra-orthodox Jews in the town of Beit Shemesh chose to don the burka, usually associated with women in repressive Islamist regimes, three years ago in a bid to protect their modesty.

Since then, the habit has spread to five other Israeli towns causing alarm among ultra-orthodox religious leaders who once saw it as a relatively harmless eccentricity – even though the number of Jewish burka wearers is not thought to be more than a few hundred.

“There is a real danger that by exaggerating, you are doing the opposite of what is intended [resulting in] severe transgressions in sexual matters,” Shlomo Pappenheim, a member of the rabbinical authority preparing to make the edict, was quoted as saying.

Ultra-Orthodox women are required to dress conservatively and keep their heads covered with a scarf, hat or wig when in public.

But even that was not enough for some, who insisted that only by covering their faces and wearing multiple layers of clothes to hide the shape of their bodies can they really be chaste.

“At first, I just wore a wig,” one burka-wearing woman told the Haaretz newspaper. “Now when I see a woman with a wig, I pray to God to forgive her for wearing that thing on her head.”

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4 Responses to Burqamania!

  1. John says:

    If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was from The Onion.

  2. Don Kenner says:

    Now THIS will surely doom the state of Israel.

    Viva la France!

  3. luke says:

    Of course, it has yet to be seen whether or not the edict will have any effect. I also don’t know if I agree with forcing a woman to wear less clothes against her will. The most interesting part of this is that it is the husbands who are asking the rabbis to prohibit it – a sign that this wasn’t forced on the women by their husbands, which would seem to be the opposite of the situation in traditionally burka-wearing cultures.

  4. Havlová says:

    Any law regulating the way a person dresses is oppressive, whether it compels a person to wear less clothing or more.

    @luke
    Don’t make assumptions about Muslim women who wear a burqa. There are some women who are forced to wear it, others who choose to.

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