Beit Shemesh – Superbus transportation company will pay NIS 13,000 (some $3,200) in compensations to Ariella Marsden, a 15-year-old high school student who was asked by a bus driver to move to the back of the bus in order to allow two haredi men to sit in the front.
During her testimony, Marsden described the chain of events, saying she boarded the bus on the way back from school with two of her friends and sat in the front. Shortly afterwards, two haredi men boarded the bus and stood in the front, even tough there were vacant seats in the back. According to Marsden, the driver then asked her and her friends to move to the back of the bus, and they complied. However, by that time there were no empty seats and the three were forced to stand for the duration of the ride.
The Beit Shemesh Small Claims Court ruled that the driver is responsible for the incident because he was the one who approached the plaintiff and her friends.
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Compare that award to Rosa parks, the black woman who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus in America. She was fined $10 plus $4 in court costs.
What a shame, why in the USA they can be buses seprete men & women (monroe bus, monsey trails, b”p willi bus) but in isreal no? & they still wane called them self a jewish state
There’s absolutely no Halachik reason to separate men and women on a bus. There’s nothing “Jewish” about doing it. It’s a stringency taken on very recently by certain Jewish groups, but it’s wrong to force others to take on your stringency.
In Monroe and Monsey these busses are privately owned. The bus in Israel is a public bus.
This is getting to be a disgrace – those men should not ever ever walk in the street because there may be WOMEN AND GIRLS ON THE STREET (OY VAY) how ignorant of those men – In Boro Park, Williamsburg, any religious community MEN and WOMEN walk in the streets – if they didn’t want pass the girls then get off the bus – bit NO make an issue. The chillul hashem of the young ‘men’ is that they are not ‘MEN”
Isn’t there a story about a Rav that was sitting on the Bus in Yerushalayim, a woman sat next to him, instead of making an issue – he got off the bus, and took another one.
That says it all.
Once again ALTERG gets his facts wrong. It is illegal for the BP-Williamsburg to deliberately separate men and women. They have already gotten into trouble for this. (I don’t know about the other bus routes.)
ALTERG has a habit of seeing only the bad in Israel and only the good in other countries. He suffers from NKS (Neturei Karta Syndrome).
Am I the only one who’s noticed that the driver seems to have acted on his own initiative? The article makes no mention of any request on the part of the two Chareidi passengers.
Maybe they understand that, as two posters have pointed out so far, there’s no halacha requiring separate buses, or separate seating sections on individual buses.
Personally, I think this smacks of Talibanism. But, given this “mehadrin” mishagas,
it would help things a lot if they separated from side to side instead of from front to back. That way you dont have the bad vibes of the “back of the bus”. That is in fact what those Monsey lines do.
its sad the girls had to stand but $3200 for a bus ride that seems a bit over the top whether or not it was wrong of the driver to ask them to move that is asking people to sit in a place that will (right or wrong) be asked to move and then sue and that is the problem in the story
no one was rude to the girls they just were asked to move
I want to say that most of the time, people on buses in Israel are warm and wonderful. I was on the # 38 bus going to the Rova – a woman with a stroller and 7 packages wanted to get on, two men “flew” off the bus to help her. She could never have gotten on by herself. She knew she could bring all those bags and that someone would assist her. One of the men was Chareidi and one wasn’t. Riding the buses in Yerushalayim is one of my favorite things – open your eyes and smell the roses.