JERUSALEM — Around 50,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews on Thursday rallied in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, police said, in a show of mass defiance over a school integration ruling by Israel's highest court.
"There are 30,000 in Jerusalem and 20,000 in Bnei Brak," near Tel Aviv, spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP. "Streets in the immediate vicinity of the demonstrations are closed to traffic".
Thousands of police were on high alert as protestors rallied against a supreme court ruling to jail a group of parents of European origin, or Ashkenazis, who are refusing to send their daughters to a school with Jewish girls of Middle Eastern descent, or Sephardis.
Although the ruling effectively pitted the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazis against the Sephardis, both communities have come together for a mass protest against what they see as the intolerable intervention of the secular state in their religious affairs.
In Jerusalem, thousands of protesters massed in a celebratory atmosphere near the western entrance to the city, the vast majority men dressed in the traditional black of the ultra-Orthodox, an AFP correspondent said.
