A Jerusalem bus featuring an advertisement by the Yerushalmit Movement. IMAGE COURTESY DOV ABRAMSON STUDIO

Among the many powerful images that circulated the week after the attacks in Paris, one was notable for its absurdity. A photograph, which ran in the Israeli ultra-Orthodox daily newspaper Hamevaser, showed the world’s heads of state, marching arm in arm in solidarity. Or rather, the male heads of state: female leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had been digitally removed from the photo in the name of religious modesty. The move was swiftly condemned. Here was flagrant religious intolerance, in the depiction of an event intended to protest such intolerance. By the next day, spoofs of the doctored image had started to circulate: one removed all the men from the photo; another turned everyone into Merkel.

This scrubbing-out was understood to be a pathetic story about a fringe sector taking ridiculous measures to try to preserve its counter-reality. (We had seen this story before. In 2011, the Brooklyn-based newspaper Di Tzeitung was shown to have removed Hillary Clinton and another woman from the historic photo of the White House Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden.) Even within the ultra-Orthodox community, which numbers some eight hundred thousand in Israel, Hamevaser is a niche publication, read by only seven per cent of ultra-Orthodox people, or Haredim. But to laugh off the image, to treat it as a curiosity, would be to disregard a serious fight being waged in Israel over the representation of women in the public sphere.

Israel has a history of greater gender equality than many Western countries. Since the turn of the twentieth century, women have been working alongside men in the kibbutz movement. Female soldiers have served in the Israel Defense Forces since its founding, with the country, in 1948. In 1969, the year Gloria Steinem threw down the gauntlet of second-wave feminism in the United States—“After Black Power, Women’s Liberation”—Israelis elected a woman, Golda Meir, as their prime minister.

Over the past decade, however, as the Haredim have grown in numbers and influence, women’s equality has significantly declined. In 2011, a female pediatrics professor was forbidden from going onstage to collect an award given by the Health Ministry; she was instructed to send a male colleague to accept it on her behalf. The same year, in the city of Beit Shemesh, where almost half the population identifies as Haredi, a group of Haredi men routinely hounded and spat at an eight-year-old girl for not being dressed “modestly enough.” When four hundred women protested the introduction of segregated buses in the city, they were pummeled with stones. There have been other recent instances of the custom known in Hebrew as hadarat nashim, or the exclusion of women, such as the chief rabbi of the air force ordering religious soldiers to walk out of events where female soldiers sing. But perhaps the most visible dispute has been taking place on the streets of Jerusalem, where a quarter of the residents now identify as Haredi.

In 2008, a thirty-year-old religious woman named Rachel Azaria headed a slate of candidates for city council. Her team had arranged to mount an ad campaign on the back of buses in the city that would feature her picture. In order to finalize the details of the campaign, Azaria called Cnaan Media, the company in charge of Jerusalem bus advertisements. “We’ve already had a schedule, we picked out the bus lines, everything,” Azaria told me on the phone this week. She was about to close the deal when the company’s salesperson casually told her: “I just want to make sure you know that we don’t show women on buses in the city.”

“I was stunned,” Azaria recounted. She hung up the phone, walked out to the street, and looked around her at passing buses. One featured an ad for a wedding venue. “It showed a groom, and a bouquet, and a set table—but no bride,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that this was happening. It was a gradual process in which women literally disappeared from Jerusalem.”

Azaria petitioned the High Court of Justice to force Cnaan Media to run the ads and, before the local elections, the judge ruled in her favor. Her face was plastered on the back of five buses, and she ended up winning a seat on the council, but the old restrictions soon resurfaced. Azaria also discovered that women were no longer appearing on Jerusalem billboards. During the months before the 2009 general elections, images of Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the Kadima party, were blacked out on posters across Jerusalem. In 2012, a credit-card company replaced the face of Gila Almagor, a renowned theatre actress, with that of a man in its Jerusalem ads. Honigman, a fashion brand, “adjusted” its campaign featuring the model Sendi Bar to show, in Jerusalem, only her torso. That year, posters for the Jerusalem Marathon portrayed only male runners—until public outcry caused the city to add images of women.

Azaria, who is now the city’s deputy mayor and holds the women’s issues portfolio, says that the fact that showing images of women has become a public issue means that she has made some progress. She partly credits this growing awareness to the broader social-protest movement in Israel, started in 2011, which championed values of equal rights and personal freedom. But much of her support, she says, comes from Haredi women, who are tired of not being seen. Haredi women traditionally do not take part in politics, but now a group of Haredi women, The Mothers’ List, is seeking representation in the Jerusalem council. In fact, Azaria often has to argue with the city’s secular population, she says. “In the so-called name of multiculturalism, they tell me, ‘What do you care? That’s how the Haredim want to live.’ But I tell them that as a religious woman it affects me, that it’s a mixed city. There’s no separation here.”

A new book by Elana Maryles Sztokman called “The War on Women in Israel” also takes to task the secular population—which includes Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat—for not putting an end to the exclusion and suppression of women. “What is perhaps most surprising about the rising oppression of women in Israel is the ease with which non-ultra-Orthodox people and groups capitulate to ultra-Orthodox demands to erase women from the public,” Sztokman writes.

In recent years, a nonprofit organization called the Yerushalmit Movement has also advocated for women’s representation in the city. The significance of the issue, according to Shira Katz-Vinkler, who heads the organization, is not only civic but also symbolic. “Jerusalem is the capital of a democratic country, so everything that happens here is a microcosm of what’s happening in Israeli society at large,” she told me. “That’s why it’s crucial that we keep the city open and accepting of each and every person who belongs to the three religions that regard the city as their home.”

Katz-Vinkler said the doctored photo from the Paris march was not surprising, but “there’s still no getting used to it.” “For years, we were a silent majority. But we’ve started to realize that if we don’t stand up to extremism, then our future here is not secure,” she said.

Three years ago, the Yerushalmit Movement attempted to launch a citywide ad campaign featuring only women. After Azaria’s victory in court, the bus company didn’t refuse the campaign, but it did argue that it feared buses would be vandalized, and tried to get the organization to pay an additional fee. After a protracted legal battle, last spring the High Court sided with the Yerushalmit Movement. In October, the organization finally mounted the campaign. It depicts women from every segment of the city’s society. They are all smiling. “Jerusalem women, nice to meet you,” the banners say.