Instead of fighting over the different forms of prayer, let us pray over the different forms of fighting, and ask that we reunite as one, with our hearts and ears, in respect and in dignity.

For the last 24 years we have been going to the Western Wall with only one goal in mind: to pray as a community of women with Torah and talllit, in full voice. This struggle for our rights as Jewish women has put me in newspapers as well as in prison; however, my intention from the beginning was neither of these things. I simply wanted to pray at Judaism's holiest site.

By Michele Chabin Religion News Service JERUSALEM (RNS) Women who want to wear prayer shawls while praying in the women's section of the Western W...

There are golf courses in Israel. And lessons to be learned while playing them.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police on Thursday detained five women at a Jerusalem holy site for performing religious rituals that ultra-Orthodox Jews say are...

The media is wild over the Women of the Wall controversy, and it's not hard to understand why. It deliciously combines women's rights issues, religion and, media's favorite topic, the Middle East, all in one bite-sized package of scandal.

Last week, 15 narrow-minded men tried to outlaw women saying the Kaddish at the Western Wall. There was so much blowback that they rescinded their ban. I cannot imagine, I do not want to imagine, that we have returned to a time where being a woman is both demeaning and dangerous.

By Michele Chabin Religion News Service JERUSALEM (RNS) The ultra-Orthodox rabbi in charge of the sacred Western Wall assured a government emissar...

As a male Orthodox Jew, I invite you to sit down with me and see where we can join forces in all those areas of discrimination against women where we can find common cause. I invite you to help me make good on the claim to all Jewish women: "Judaism glorifies you."

We end public readings of the Scroll of Esther with a blessing. "Blessed are you, God, who takes up our grievance, judges our claim and avenges the wrongs against us. You bring retribution on our enemies and vengeance on our foes." It's a tragedy when those we have in mind are other Jews.

In a month where the predictable has vied with the unprecedented, may we be truly surprised by the reversal of policies of intolerance, and the respect for each others' own practices, beliefs and doubts.

Empathy is never easy. As a man, I confess that I have struggled to be empathetic to the cause of a group of women that has been coming to the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem for close to a quarter century to pray in protest of the religious freedom they lack. But ater this morning, the Women of the Wall have my respect and my support.

The Western Wall is a good place to launch a re-commitment to the Torah's vision of "one law," of unity without uniformity, and to Israel's imperfect but vigorous expression of democracy in action.

Many thought Hamas didn't have the technological ability to send missiles to Jerusalem. Many others believed that Hamas would never fire missiles on the city because it houses Islam's third most holy site. But those assumptions can no longer be assumed.

The Western Wall was liberated, yet free religious access has been obliterated. The Wall has been captured lock, stock and barrel, hijacked by a group of extremists who represent a minority among the Jewish people, a minority in Israel as well as around the world.

Tensions have mounted in Jerusalem, and the current lines are drawn between a growing and relatively impoverished Haredi community and a largely Anglo and comfortable liberal community. Both see the Wall as a sacred pilgrimage and prayer site.

I have cast my fate with Women of the Wall for a simple reason: I believe Jewish women have the same rights as Jewish men to pray at Israel's holy sites.