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How many Yaakov Hagoels are there?

Yaakov Hagoel, pro tem chairman of the Jewish Agency, has written an angry letter to himself as chair of the WZO, over events at the Kotel

May 10, 2022 11:13
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JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - March 03, 2013: Jewish worshipers (women) pray at the Western Wall an important jewish religious site. Western Wall is located in Old City in Jerusalem. It is site for Jewish prayers for centuries. There are two sections, one for men and the other for women. Today, it is also a destination for tourist from all over the world.
3 min read

It’s not hard to wonder whether Yaakov Hagoel, the pro tem chairman of the Jewish Agency, has an evil twin, who is also called Yaakov Hagoel and is chairman of the World Zionist Organisation. As the old joke goes, they are never seen in the same room at the same time.

But certainly only someone named Yaakov Hagoel is best placed to solve the mystery of what exactly happened at the Western Wall this week, when fights, both verbal and physical, broke out between the Women of the Wall and groups of young women from Orthodox seminaries, the latter apparently brought in under the auspices of the WZO in order to disrupt the Women of the Wall’s prayers.

So volatile were these encounters that Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, wrote to Yaakov Hagoel of the World Zionist Organisation about the “violent harassment” of the Women of the Wall, who have been striving for equality of prayer at the Kotel since 1988. 

Van der Zyl asked Hagoel for an explanation: because, it is claimed, the seminary students were actually brought by bus to Jerusalem, buses booked and paid for by two departments of the WZO, the grandly-titled “Department of Periphery and Diaspora Affairs” and the Department of Resource, Development and Community Relations.

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Israel