The Housing and Construction Ministry recently decided to provide housing and mortgage assistance to common-law couples, including those of the same sex, thereby removing one of the major obstacles to equality for alternative families.

The decision, which was made two months ago, changes the ministry's policy of granting such benefits only to married couples and common-law couples with at least one joint child.

"The housing ministry was nearly the last stronghold that persistently refused, for many years, to apply these benefits to common-law couples as well," Dan Yakir, the chief legal counsel for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said Monday. "This is also the first instance I know of in which straight people are enjoying expanded benefits in the wake of a gay struggle. Up to now, they have applied benefits to gays that had been given to straight common-law couples."

(Jerusalem) The newly opened Kosher Gym in Jerusalem offers prayer books instead of magazines at its juice bar, and bearded men listen to Talmudic interpretations on earphones as they exercise.

In an Internet chat room, messages about Outlook and Microsoft pop up in Yiddish. At upscale kosher restaurants, men in black hats and sidecurls, accompanied by wives in wigs and long dresses, sip fine wines.

If that's one face of the haredim -- "the God-fearing," as Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews refer to themselves -- another is the young hotheads who torch clothing stores in their neighborhood for selling "immodest" attire, and hurl bleach at women who wear it.

From cell phones to Stairmasters, from women's rights to Hebrew slang, the outside world is seeping into the cloistered haredi community and plunging it into a tug-of-war between a tentative embrace of modernity and fierce resistance.

Similar communities are replicated across the world, with the Bible and Jewish law central to their lives. The difference is that in New York, London or Sydney they have little impact on society around them. In Israel, the relationship is very different, and often bumpy.

Haredi political parties have often held the political power to make or break a government. The men spend their lives in prayer and study, subsidized by taxpayers who can't see why they don't just get a job. Every secular Israeli, male and female, must do military service, the great leveler in a country of immigrants from east and west. But haredim are exempt.

They belong to a religious power structure which at various times during Israel's existence has managed to ban public transport on the Sabbath, grounded El Al, the national airline, on holy days, and has absolute control of all Jewish marriage and divorce. This power was reinforced last month when 12 of 15 new rabbinical court judges were recruited from the ultra-Orthodox -- a move that caused a furor among secular Israelis who had hoped more moderate judges would join the court.

Haredim tend not to take firm stances on the big issue confronting Israeli society -- war and peace with the Arabs. But their birthrate of seven children to a family is a force in Israel's demographic race against the Palestinians.

As Israeli society grows more pluralist, advancing the rights of women and gays, the haredim cling to the old ways, and sometimes the clash is extreme; in 2005, when Jerusalem held a gay pride parade, a protesting ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed and wounded three marchers.

Yet reality is forcing change in many areas.

I wonder where they lifted it from...

A worker was wounded Friday after a bomb exploded when his tractor rode over it in the settlement of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem -- littering the ground around the bomb site were flyers denouncing this year's planned gay pride celebration in Jerusalem.

The flyers allegedly came from the ultra-Orthodox Hardei sect. Police said there were trying to determine if there is a connection.

Last Sunday Jerusalem's LGBT community center applied for a parade license for June 21. A spokesperson for Open House condemned the bombing. "Morally bankrupt religious bigotry will never deter us from our struggle for freedom of expression and full and equal civil and religious rights," said Noa Sattah, Executive Director of Open House. "We urge the Jerusalem police to find the perpetrators of this despicable action and bring them to justice."

[...]

The Haredi have become a growing force in Israeli politics, raising fears among some that the country could turn into an ultra-Orthodox state. Haredi political parties have often held the political power to make or break a government.

No one from the sect has claimed direct responsibility for Friday's bombing. Police officials said it appeared the pipe bomb had been planted so it would go off if a tractor rolled over it.

The settlement is, police noted, near the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Ramat Beit Shemesh. Investigations are trying to determine if anyone from that community was involved in the incident.

why are these people being described as an "anti-gay Jewish sect" and not what they are -- terrorists?

Deputy Premier Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) expressed his objection to a campaign that would encourage homosexual tourist to come to Israel. He said that Tourism Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch had told him that he too rejected the idea.

Yishai said that "this is a fantastic, unreal idea. Jerusalem has many tourist attractions that draw thousands of tourist from all over the world and members of all religions. I am disgusted by the attempt to focus a campaign on this delusional, defected minority."

The Israeli Knesset is about to make a tragic mistake with far reaching consequences if it votes to ban Gay Pride rallies. This anti-democratic action will alienate secular Jews - gay and straight - worldwide and force stalwart defenders of Israel to rethink their allegiance. American Jews overwhelmingly reject the intolerance of our homegrown Christian Right, so the notion that we will blindly support Jewish Pat Robertsons in Jerusalem is a dangerous miscalculation.

Recently, the Knesset proposed one amendment that would empower the Jerusalem mayor to prohibit Gay Pride and other parades based on religious sensitivities or alleged threats to public order. A first reading of this bill passed 40-23. In a second, more far-reaching bill, the Shas Party called for a ban on all pride parades throughout the country. This measure - which threatens freedom of speech and assembly - was approved by a vote of 41-21.

Gay rights groups on Thursday fiercely criticized Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann for bowing to pressure by religious parties in his decision to redraft inheritance laws.

The revised bill would preclude homosexual couples from inheritance laws that apply to people in common-law marriages.

It's appropriate that gay activists wanted to hold their Pride parade in Old Jerusalem last November. It also came as no surprise to me that the Holy City's ultra-conservative rabbis, priests and imams — who rarely ever unite over anything — successfully lobbied to cancel the parade.

"Jerusalem is where we pray," one Israeli told me. "Tel Aviv is where we play."

Even openly gay Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox — whose feature film Yossi and Jagger chronicles gay Israeli soldiers in love — once told me, "I don't like what Jerusalem represents. It's all about religion and land. Quite frankly I'd prefer a peace march to a gay march."

When in Jerusalem I made a point of visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Museum. It was a very moving experience but during my admittedly brief tour (one hour versus the three hours one really needs to explore this place) I'm afraid to report that I found not one word about the gay victims of the Holocaust — and it bears repeating that Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler himself once boasted that the Nazis murdered one million homosexuals between 1939 and 1944.

Despite intense pressure from ultra-Orthodox religious parties Israel's Justice Minister has backed down on a plan to define common-law marriage as between "a man and a woman" in a new bill on inheritance rights.

Earlier this month it was disclosed that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann had revised the draft bill to specifically exclude gay and lesbian couples.

The original draft was gender neutral and approved by the cabinet. Friedman changed it following a meeting with the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.

[...]

The change in the wording of the bill angered LGBT civil rights groups fighting for recognition in Israel.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel warned that the revision would strip away rights gay and lesbian couples had already won.

Friedmann now has told the Association that he "would not advance the proposed Inheritance Law, if the matter would harm the property rights of same-sex couples."

He said will now try to work out a compromise with the Shas party. In the meantime, other provisions of the bill will proceed he said.