Action taken against J'lem Municipality for vandalization of woman's photo

The petition was filed in response to the repeated vandalism of a photo of Holocaust survivor Peggy Parnes, which is displayed in Safra Square, home to Jerusalem's municipal offices, as part of a larger photo exhibition.

The reoccurring vandalism of Peggy's photo is not unusual, and there is a widespread trend across Jerusalem of destroying photographs, posters, and signs featuring women, should they appear in public spaces. 

 

Women's faces are scratched out, torn off, or painted over, in a humiliating and insulting attempt to erase women from public spaces. 

Not only are these incidents not merely the attempts of a few fringe extremists, but they are so mainstream and frequent, that "advertising companies may refuse to show women’s pictures in certain areas knowing that they will be destroyed, and that the police are unlikely to chase the perpetrators," wrote Shoshana Keats-Jaskoll for The Jerusalem Post earlier this year.

According to IRAC, which has been tracking these incidents for five years and has written multiple letters of complaint to the municipality, this issue has persistently been ignored. 

The letters call on the municipality to preserve a respectful public domain in the city, and to remember the municipal bylaw which prohibits the vandalism of signs.

Speaking about the decision to pursue legal action against the municipality, IRAC executive director Anat Hoffman said that "the vandalism of a photo honoring Holocaust survivor Peggy Parnes is heartbreaking and infuriating. Desecrating images of women is the most aggressive way of excluding women from the public domain, and is clearly not in line with Judaism." 

Besides the recent vandalism of Peggy Parnes' photograph, several other key incidents have caught public attention in the last few years, and not just in Jerusalem.

Prior to the April 2019 elections, Meretz threatened to sue the Bnei Brak municipality for deliberately removing Tzipi Livni from a billboard featuring a variety of Center-Left political candidates. At the time of the incident, Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg called the incident part of a large culture of violence, and erasure of women from society.

As recently as March 2021, posters of Israeli singer Achinoam Nini and musician Ofra Yitzhaki were vandalized at the entrance to Jerusalem. The posters had been part of an exhibition called "Making Music out of Trauma" by photographer Eyal Hirsch. 

IRAC work to advance equality in Israel and has fought multiple legal battles in the years since it was founded in 1987. It has been involved in leading the fight against gender discrimination over the years, and was responsible for the High Court case in 2011 which ruled that gender segregation on public transportation was illegal, as well as the ruling which forced the Beit Shemesh municipality to remove their "modesty signs" from the streets in 2019.

"We are saddened that we must remind the Municipality of Jerusalem time and time again, year after year, of their basic obligation to uphold the law prohibiting the vandalism of signs with images of women, to the point that we were forced to file a legal petition on the matter," Hoffman said.