FROM OUR ARCHIVES

65 YEARS AGO November 12, 1952

The body of president Chaim Weizmann was laid to rest in the garden of his home in Rehovot. Only a few hundred people were privileged to be present, while 30,000 others gathered on nearby hilltops, and hundreds of thousands listened to the service broadcast by Kol Yisrael. Thousands of people who came too late to pay their last respects to Weizmann were turned away from the President’s Residence. By that time a quarter of a million people had already filed by the bier, according to official estimates. Weizmann was buried in a grove of young olive and fruit trees planted in his honor on his 70th and 75th birthdays, in accordance with his request. Weizmann had said that the cypresses on the hill reminded him of a “minyan of old Jews standing for the Shmoneh-Esreh prayer in the evening” and that was where he wanted to be buried.

50 YEARS AGO November 12, 1967

The Ministerial Committee on the Holy Places was likely to meet soon to discuss the controversial plan of the Religious Affairs Ministry for the Western Wall compound. The ministry’s plan would leave the whole compound as it was. The deepened level would be for those wishing to pray, with the sexes separated by a movable partition, and the two-and-a-half-meter-high level at some distance from the Wall would remain as a kind of balcony for those merely wishing to look at the Wall. Another amendment likely to be raised at the committee was to leave one section of the Wall open and free of restrictions

25 YEARS AGO November 12, 1992

A government-sponsored bill would permit sanctions against men who did not grant their wives a divorce within 30 days of being instructed to do so by a rabbinical court. The courts could imprison a man or excommunicate him for obstinacy, but rarely chose that course of action. The bill would permit the courts to deny a man permission to leave the country or receive a passport or prevent him from renewing a driver’s license or getting one. The bill would also forbid him from holding a civil service job. More directly, he would not be able to open a bank account, cash a check made out in his name or use a credit card in his name. The proposed bill received lukewarm praise from a number of women’s groups as not being as far-reaching as they would have liked. They noted that it only applied in cases where there was already an “order” from a rabbinical court for a divorce. “A woman who wants out of her marriage can wait years in a rabbinical court before reaching this stage,” Miriam Isserow of the Women’s Network said. Rabbi Uri Regev, head of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center, welcomed the proposal, but added that it was a small step toward resolving the problems of personal status. This could be accomplished, he said, only by ending the monopoly held by the Orthodox over all Jews in questions of marriage and divorce.