When news broke of women being banned from driving, the position of females in ultra-orthodox Jewish society came under scrutiny. We go inside a closed world

By Sally Howard, Sunday 21 June 2015

The Hebrew phrase “chillul hashem” translates as bringing shame upon one’s community in the eyes of the outside world. It can be invoked by anything from double-parking to failure to observe the complicated latticework of laws that circumscribe orthodox Jewish life, dictating everything from hairstyles to behaviour.

These days chillul hashem is as likely to spark a trending hashtag. Recently, a leaked letter sent by school leaders in the north London Belz sect condemned mothers for their “immodesty” in driving their children to school. Social media was inflamed, while women’s groups drew comparisons with Saudi Arabia.

A few months earlier, a scandal was ignited when an Instagram post of a street sign from a Hackney Torah procession went viral. It read, in English and Yiddish: “Women should please walk along this side of the road only.”

“It was boring,” says Ilana Freedman of the furore, sitting in the flat she shares with her rabbi husband and four young sons, above a west London synagogue. “That sign was intended to make our women feel comfortable,”she says. “But it became part of that tired narrative about Haredi [ultra-orthodox Jewish] women being oppressed.”

Freedman’s pet hate is Western feminists’ reading of an ultra-orthodox Jewish woman’s lot as, “All about wigs, menstrual rites and being downtrodden,” she says. “Belz rabbis themselves don’t drive. But it’s easy to wheel out that tired old story about Haredi women being oppressed.”