Rachel Weinstein calls it her Rosa Parks moment. On a recent morning, the 38-year-old Israeli boarded a bus to a local shopping center in her town. It was the same line she takes regularly, but on this day an ultra-Orthodox passenger directed her to the back of the bus where, she noticed, the women were sitting separately. “He was actually addressing my husband, who boarded with me,” she recounted toNewsweek. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.” Weinstein lives in Beit Shemesh, a town of both religious and nonreligious Jews where the population of ultra-Orthodox—the most theologically rigid of Judaism’s denominations—has surged in recent years.
Instead of complying, Weinstein took a seat several rows behind the driver and held her ground, channeling the spirit of that American civil-rights icon from more than a half century ago. A native of New York City who describes herself as modern Orthodox, Weinstein immigrated to Israel earlier this year to live among “like-minded Jews,” she says, not extremists. When the anger around her felt menacing—one woman charged from the back of the bus to berate her for not showing sufficient respect—Weinstein clutched a ring of keys in her purse and prepared to swing it if things turned violent. After several tense minutes, she got off at her stop and wept.