How did Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff square become a battleground for religion and gender segregation on Yom Kippur and how did the conflict become so charged and bitter?

In conversation with Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Orly Erez-Lizhovski, executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center and the country’s leading attorney on gender segregation cases, explains the background to the disturbing pictures that dominated Israeli media over Judaism’s most solemn holiday.

The sight of Jews battling each other in the first Hebrew city were “heartbreaking” and “hard to watch” she said, and were caused by the “failed decisions” of the Israeli police and the Tel Aviv municipality, who refused to intervene when an illegal gender separation barrier was erected in the center of a public square.

At the same time, she believes, this moment may represent a turning point, since it “marks a tremendous change in the attitude of this very liberal public toward both issues of religious pluralism and gender segregation. I think it's a very hard and difficult period, but it also signals change into what may be a better future.”

This “awakening” she says is happening in the context of the battle against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. “What people may have been willing to accept up until a few years ago, or up until basically the last few months, they are not willing to accept anymore.”

The far right anti-liberal group that organized the prayer in Dizengoff square - Rosh Yehudi - "holds extremist views and has been trying to bring these views into the public sphere of Tel Aviv for years," adds Erez-Lizhovski, "But now they were confronted with a reality they have never met before."

Israelis like the ones who went out on Yom Kippur eve to confront the extremists who are trying to force a certain kind of Judaism on society, she says, now “understand that this is not only a fight for the democratic structure of Israel, it's a fight for our Jewish identity.”