Jerusalem - A bus pulls up to a stop in Jerusalem and the waiting crowd divides - men flock to the front and women to the back - an illustration, activists say, of a disturbing trend of gender segregation.
Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that the buses, which serve Israel's most conservative, ultra-Orthodox communities, cannot enforce separation between the sexes.
But activists say that has not stopped the most religious elements of Israeli society from trying to impose strict gender divides on the country's largely secular population.
They say the trend affects women's access to public services, their ability to mourn publicly, and even the depiction of women in billboard advertising, posing a threat to Israel's democracy.
But conservative Jews say their growing numbers and the increasing “permissiveness” of Israeli society justify measures to help them observe their religious practices.
The issue of gender segregation is not new in Israel, where many observe religious practices that promote “modesty” and restrict mingling of the sexes.
But activists say ultra-Orthodox Jews, who constitute around 10 percent of the population, have become increasingly “radical” on the issue and are winning concessions that harm women.
Rachel Azaria, a member of Jerusalem city council, first came up against the issue when she approached a company to have her campaign posters placed on the side of Jerusalem buses while running for office in 2008.
“They said in Jerusalem you can't have women on posters on the buses because the ultra-Orthodox don't approve of it,” she told AFP.
She challenged the ban successfully, but later found herself taking on Jerusalem's secular mayor Nir Barkat over the city's unofficial policy of not using female images in its posters.
“I feel that multi-culturalism took over and suddenly the majority couldn't say anything because we had to take into consideration the smaller groups,” she said.
Orly Erez-Likhovski, a lawyer with the Israel Religious Action Centre who worked on the bus segregation campaign, says there are many other battlegrounds.
Posters featuring women are defaced, city councils hold sex-segregated events and religious soldiers walk out of army events where female troops sing.
Even funerals, which are almost exclusively presided over by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, are mostly sex-segregated, and women are sometimes barred from speaking, she says.
Erez-Likhovski insists that most ultra-Orthodox oppose such extreme measures, blaming a “radical segment” that has cowed both the community and secular society.
While the fight over bus segregation has been running for years, Erez-Likhovski says there has been an increase in attempts to exclude women from public space.
“It's sort of a backlash: as general society becomes more and more modern, the ultra-Orthodox society tries to become more and more closed in opposition to the growing modernisation of Israeli society,” she said.
Ultra-Orthodox rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits agrees.
“The permissiveness in society has become so much more rampant,” he told AFP. “Today when a deeply religious person has to go through certain parts of town... he encounters many things that he would not want to see.
“The traditional religious view sees men and women... as being equal but separate in social contexts. In a perfect religious world that would be the norm,” he added.
Jakobovits said the best solution was for secular and religious society to exist as separately as possible, but Erez-Likhovski said Israel's leaders should draw a line at the issue of segregation.
“When I'm talking about public services, public space, we should never allow any segregation or exclusion of women.
“This is a democracy: whether we talk about Mea Shearim or in Tel Aviv, it's the same,” she said, referring to an ultra-Orthodox quarter in Jerusalem.
“I don't say we should do something out of spite, but we're talking about the public sphere and it should be democratic.”
Azaria agrees, and says she feels the tide is turning in Israel against concessions on sex-separation, citing Jerusalem's recent decision to reintroduce adverts featuring women's faces.
“I think now, people are against it. In the past everybody said there's nothing you can do because of the ultra-Orthodox, but now finally they realise it is something that has to be fought against.” - Sapa-AFP