JERUSALEM — It is a strange experience to have another person spit on you. To have an ultra-Orthodox teenager look you dead in the eye and mutter “shiska” or “kalba” — the Hebrew word for bitch — and then decide you deserve a little something more than a slur because he knows you are a liberal Jew.

That this happened several times here Friday morning, on International Women’s Day at the Western Wall, tells you a lot about the state of religious liberty in a country that prides itself on being the Middle East’s only free nation — and about the resilience of activists who refuse to allow fundamentalists to control public Jewish life.

The Women of the Wall are used to getting spit on, not to mention shoved, scratched, kicked and pelted with dirty diapers. For the past 30 years, the feminist prayer group has held a monthly service in the women’s section of the Western Wall, where they wear prayer shawls and read from the Torah. Walk into any Reform or Conservative synagogue in the world and women will be doing exactly that, without fanfare, often in synagogues helmed by female rabbis. But at the Western Wall, which, like other holy sites in Israel, is controlled by the Chief Rabbinate, such egalitarian displays inspire angry protests. Ultra-Orthodox Jews see such behavior at the holy site as sacrilege, and various members of Women of the Wall have been arrested for “disturbing the public order.”

The feminist group is not just protesting the state of affairs at the wall. They are protesting the rabbinate’s monopoly on Jewish life in the Jewish state. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are not Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox hold the keys not just to Israel’s Jewish sacred places, but to the life cycle events — circumcisions, conversions, weddings, divorces, burials — of the country’s more than six million Jews.

In January 2016, the Women of the Wall appeared to have won a major victory when the Israeli government outlined a new plan to honor progressive Judaism at the Western Wall by creating a prayer space where men and women would be able to pray together. The move was a hard-won symbol, especially to the largely liberal Jewish diaspora, that their voices mattered to the state meant to represent all Jewish people. Then, in June 2017, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reneged, citing pressure from his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.

The fallout of Bibi’s broken promise was everywhere in evidence on Friday morning.

Urged on by their rabbis and often bused in by their high schools, thousands of teenage girls in long skirts and teenage boys in black hats showed up to flood the zone. I have been to the Western Wall well over a dozen times in my life and I have never seen it so packed. The crowd made it extremely difficult to move and nearly impossible to escape if you found yourself surrounded.

I watched as Yizhar Hess, the head of the Conservative movement in Israel, was circled by a group of screaming young men who shoved him, spit on him, ripped off his prayer shawl and tossed his kippah into the crowd.

Rabbi Susan Silverman told me she was pushed to the ground and ended up banging her head on the Jerusalem stone. An ultra-Orthodox teenage girl went to kick her in the head, Rabbi Silverman said, and was only stopped when the rabbi’s 24-year-old daughter screamed at her.

I met a few young women, some wearing Women of the Wall T-shirts, who were in tears, explaining how the crowd had pushed against them so aggressively that they had a hard time breathing.

Fira Zinger, an 18-year-old whose mother is a rabbi, told me that she cried because “this makes me feel like I’m not a part of my own country.”

Despite all of this, the activists I spoke to were determined. “The fact that so many Haredim came today is only because they know their monopoly is collapsing,” Dr. Hess told me, using a Hebrew word for the ultra-Orthodox. “Pluralism will succeed in Israel.”

Yadid Eral told me he came from Tel Aviv to be a “body man” for his mother. She comes semi-regularly, but he joins only “when it seems like it will be a rumble,” he said while holding her purse. “These women don’t come here to kick their feet up and drink martinis. These women are strong.”

Einav Kahila, an 18-year-old who came out to support the Women of the Wall, said, “We read the same Torah; we say the same prayers. The Western Wall is not theirs. It belongs to all of the Jewish people.”

Rabbi Silverman used even stronger language. “As soon as a sect of Judaism says, ‘We know God’s will,’ it’s like saying ‘God is something we can fit into our minds like something we can fit in our hands.’ That’s idolatry.”

I also spoke to the ultra-Orthodox girls on the other side of the divide. Many told me, variously and earnestly, that the feminists are provoking this reaction. That this is inevitable when you are near a crowd of young men. That it hurts them to see Reform Jews practicing Judaism in a way they are sure, they tell me, God does not like. That they love God so much that they deny their own desires — like singing out loud in public — to show Him their devotion. That they turned out that morning because their rabbis told them to.

These passionate, ideological young women may not know any better. Others do. And they deserve blame.

I blame politicians like Yaakov Litzman, the deputy health minister, who refused to denounce the ultra-Orthodox violence and said that the Women of the Wall “should have been thrown out.”

I blame the Jerusalem police who condemned not the thousands of young people who came to antagonize, but the 150 or so Women of the Wall who came with “the express intention to create friction and provocations.” This is an utter lie. What was scary about Friday morning was the fact that every time I saw a conflict break out, it was instigated by the ultra-Orthodox, and almost every time, those who ought to have been protecting the Women of the Wall were nowhere to be found.

Ultimately, I blame the government of Israel, which has done nothing to change the status quo and has sent a very clear message to non-Orthodox Jews: You do not matter.

We do. And those of us who support the righteous work of groups like Women of the Wall should send the government a clear message back: The wall is just the beginning. It’s time to dismantle the rabbinate itself.

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Bari Weiss is a staff editor and writer for the Opinion section. @bariweiss

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