Having women behind the wheel goes against "the traditional rules of modesty in our camp," Jewish leaders say
NEW YORK, May 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Leaders of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Britain want to ban women from driving, the Jewish Chronicle reported on Thursday.
Having women behind the wheel goes against "the traditional rules of modesty in our camp," religious and educational leaders of the Belz Hasidic sect in the north London borough of Stamford Hill said in a letter.
The growing number of mothers driving their children to school has sparked "great resentment among parents of pupils of our institutions," the letter said, adding that those children will be barred from school starting in August.
The directive came from Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach, the Belz leader in Israel, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
The Belz sect took its name from the Ukrainian town where it was formed in the early 19th century. It established its headquarters in Israel after the Second World War.
"There's nothing wrong with a woman driving. It's definitely not within the laws and the norms and mores of the Orthodox community," Rabbi Kenneth Brander, vice president for university and community life at Yeshiva University in New York City, told Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"I think when it comes to laws on modesty and on women's issues, different religious communities view modesty differently," he said.
This is believed to be the first such ban imposed in the UK.
"The truth is that this has no scriptural, textual or legal basis. There's nothing in Jewish law from which you can actually derive anything like that," Dina Brawer, the UK ambassador of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, told London's Evening Standard.
In a move to distance itself from the ban, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said the letter came from a marginal and unaffiliated group, the Guardian reported.
"We happen to believe that driving is a high-pressured activity where our values maybe compromised by exposure to selfishness, road-rage, bad language and other inappropriate behaviour," a local Belz women's organisation said in a statement.
(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
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