It appears that graphic artists and public relations professionals in Jerusalem have recently developed a fetish for shoes. A glance at billboards and posters pasted around the city shows that Jerusalem is draped in shoes.

In Jerusalem, a shoe is not just a shoe, says Uri Ayalon, a Conservative rabbi who promotes religious pluralism, and who recently established an uncensored Facebook group that protests against the elimination of women from public spaces. Shoe images, he says, are used to obscure the fact that in Jerusalem women are rarely pictured on public posters and billboards.

It takes time to grasp that something is missing in public spaces in Israel's capital. But once you notice it, it's hard to fathom how you didn't pay attention to this fact earlier. It appears that in recent years, and in an escalated fashion in the past several months, women have disappeared from advertisements in Jerusalem.

This fact does not refer to scantily clad models, who were purged from signs and posters in the city several years ago as a result of campaigns waged by the ultra-Orthodox - struggles that sometimes included the burning and destruction of billboards and bus stops. The purging of women from publicly displayed pictures in Jerusalem applies to images of females in regular dress and daily situations. Pictures of women in family settings and advertisements of women using face cream or being connected to food or fashion products are hard to come by in this city.

Jerusalem municipality officials adamantly deny that there has been a change in the city's advertising policy, and they refer to several advertising campaigns that featured images of women. However, figures in the city's public relations industry admit that women have been entirely removed from public billboards and pictorial advertisements.

It seems that this trend is being led by private advertisers who prefer to conceal women rather than deal with ultra-Orthodox anger. For instance, a hamburger company that promoted its product around the country with a picture of happy family members choose in Jerusalem to show only images of its burgers. In Jerusalem, a campaign for regional radio stations dropped the image of radio presenter Ofira Asayag, which was featured everywhere else in the country.

This becomes a process of self-censorship, explains Rabbi Ayalon. You decide in advance not to use a photograph of a female dancer, so that nobody sprays it. You decide not to confront anything, and that's the position adopted by the advertisement agencies.

Six women met in Jerusalem to be photographed so their pictures can be hung from balconies throughout the city to counteract what appears to be the attempt to keep women out of advertising in the capital.

A group that calls itself Yerushalmim (Jerusalemites ) and focuses on issues of pluralism is behind the initiative.

The idea is to return the city space to its natural state and turn the appearance of women into something boring, that no one notices, one of the originators of the idea, Rabbi Uri Ayalon, a Conservative rabbi who created a Facebook page called uncensored, through which the women signed up to be photographed.

The six volunteers met at the Jerusalem home of activist Shira Katz-Winkler. One of them, Idit Karni, says: A minority can't take over the city and cause women and girls to disappear. I have four daughters, and I don't intend to leave them a city that has lost its sanity.

Another of the volunteers, Tzafira Stern-Asal who is the director of a dance school, says she has had personal experience with the difficulty of putting women in advertising in the capital when trying to advertise her school. I finally had to limit myself to a shoe or some sort of fluttering material, which certainly reduces the attraction of the ad, she says.

In the first phase of the project, 100 posters of the women will be hung throughout the city, focusing on the downtown area.

The women believe the problem lies with advertisers, who self-censor out of fear of the ultra-Orthodox. Now we'll see the skies won't fall. I don't say it will pass quietly, but people will breathe easier when they see pictures of women returning to billboards.

Jerusalem's secular mayor, Nir Barkat, has pitted himself against the city's swelling ranks of ultra-orthodox extremists by demanding that local police enable women to reclaim their position in the public domain.

Over recent months, women's faces have disappeared from billboards across the city amid mounting pressure applied by the powerful ultra-orthodox lobby, who find the female image offensive.

Advertisers that do not fall in line with the standards of the extreme ultra-orthodox have frequently fallen victim to direct action. Across Jerusalem, female figures have been blacked out of billboards with spray-paint, or vandalised with graffiti branding the image illegal. Other posters are simply torn down.

On Sunday, Barkat wrote a letter to district police commander Niso Shaham in which he said: We must make sure that those who want to advertise [with] women's images in the city can do so without fear of vandalism and defacement of billboards or buses showing women.

The battle over Jerusalem's billboards is only one manifestation of an alarming trend towards gender segregation across Israel driven by the religious right. Activist Hila Benyovich-Hoffman was spurred to take action by reports that nine male cadets in the Israeli Defence Force had walked out of an army event in September because women were singing. Four were expelled from an officer's training course for refusing to apologise. Benyovich-Hoffman said:

This was the final straw for me, that these cadets could humiliate female soldiers because some rabbi has told them that a woman's voice is indecent. The army used to be a source of pride because women served alongside men as equals. But more and more, rabbis are influencing army behaviour.

She organised a series of demonstrations last Friday in which hundreds of women gathered for singalongs in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Beersheva to demand their right to a public presence. She says much more needs to be done.

Defaced

On a cold night in the centre of Jerusalem this week, women sang, swayed and danced, united in outrage at the exclusion of women and growing gender segregation in the public arena.

We won't stop singing or showing women's faces or dancing until this ugly phenomenon which is foreign to Judaism or to any democratic society has vanished, said Micky Gidzin, of Be Free Israel, the organisers of the musical protest: This issue is a symbol of what kind of society we want to be.

The values of a minority are increasingly encroaching on public life, added Sue Grodetsky, a participant in the event. The minority is zealous ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, Jews. Their demands for gender segregation and the exclusion and boycotting of women in the public sphere led to criticism by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

At a private meeting in Washington, according to reports, she said the vilification of women was reminiscent of extremist regimes and that the practice of separating women and men on public buses reminded her of racial segregation in the American south in the 1950s.

Advertisers have bowed to Haredi pressure to remove images of women from posters and billboards. Many that have continued to show women have been ripped down or defaced.

A bookshop, Manny's, in the heart of Jerusalem's Haredi area, recently acceded to demands by a local extremist Haredi group following a campaign in which the store's windows were smashed dozens of times, glue was poured into locks and bags of excrement dumped inside. Now a sign addressed To our lady customers says: Please enter my store in modest clothes. Modest clothes include closed blouse with long sleeves, long skirts, no tight-fitting clothes.

Defaced

Cnaan Advertising, the company that places advertisements on buses in Jerusalem, has refused to carry ads for activists campaigning in support of women's equality.

The company demanded a NIS 50,000 (£8,500) guarantee from Yerushalmim (Jerusalemites), the movement that is running the campaign, to insure against any possible vandalism of the buses by the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) extremist community.

Yerushalmim posted women's images on billboards all over the city about six weeks ago as part of its campaign against women's exclusion from the public square in Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, the movement decided to launch an ad campaign on buses, under the slogan Introducing Jerusalem women. The ads all show fully-dressed women. But Cnaan, which owns the franchise for bus advertising in Jerusalem, nevertheless refused.

The company has refused to place ads featuring women on buses for several years, claiming they are not worth its while because Haredim vandalize the buses.

Thousands of Israelis have held a rally in the town of Beit Shemesh against ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremism.

The protest followed clashes after an eight-year-old girl said she had been harassed on her way to school. The ultra-Orthodox community in Beit Shemesh is seeking to segregate men and women.

President Shimon Peres has backed the protest, saying the entire nation must be recruited in order to save the majority from the hands of a small minority. He said the demonstration was a defence of the character of the state of Israel against a minority which breaks our national solidarity.

By early evening thousands of demonstrators had gathered in Beit Shemesh, waving banners saying Free Israel. People are angry at the growing influence of Israel's conservative ultra-Orthodox Jews and in particular their treatment of women.

It is a tiny minority of ultra-Orthodox who carry out such attacks. But many Israelis believe the country's character is at stake. They resent the fact that most ultra-Orthodox men don't work or serve in the army. Instead, the government gives them subsidies to carry out religious studies. One man here told me Jewish religious extremism posed a bigger threat to the country than Iran.

In Beit Shemesh, where the opposing communities live in close proximity, there have been regular protests by ultra-Orthodox men outside a religious girls school against what they say is the immodest dress of the children. Anger spilled over after a documentary was broadcast on national TV in which one of the girls, eight-year-Naama Margolese, said she was afraid to walk to school in the town because ultra-Orthodox men shouted at her.

Hundreds of extremist ultra-Orthodox Jews, some ludicrously claiming persecution by wearing yellow stars or the uniforms of Holocaust death camp inmates, demonstrated against what they called media attacks against them over their intimidatory efforts to segregate the sexes in public.

Israeli TV channels have screened images from the town of Beit Shemesh, where hardline residents are waging a sometimes violent gender segregation campaign, which showed an ultra-Orthodox man in Beit Shemesh spitting at a woman and others hurling verbal abuse at an eight-year-old schoolgirl.

The scenes have prompted outraged newspaper editorials and vows from politicians to get tough with troublemakers. The phenomenon of the exclusion of women from ultra-Orthodox streets is an act of intolerable barbarism, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview: It is inconceivable for the state to continue financing those who defy it and for the ultra-Orthodox to continue receiving subsidies, such as free (religious) schooling for their children.

For Example

1st January 2012. See article from freethinker.co.uk

Shlomo Fuchs is a puzzled man. The ultra-Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem cannot understand why he was taken into custody earlier this week for exercising his right to freedom of expression. After all, all he did was to abuse a female soldier, calling her a slut, slut, slut! for not taking a back seat on a bus.

Fuchs, a father of 12, was arrested by the Jerusalem police for bad-mouthing Doron Matalon when she refused to sit at the back of an Egged bus.

Fuchs' attorney claimed his client's behaviour did not constitute a criminal offense. We live in a free country. We're allowed to curse, it's part of the freedom of expression.

A day later Fuchs was indicted for unruly behaviour and sexual harassment. Jerusalem Magistrate's Court released Fuchs under limiting conditions, forbidding him from using public transportation until the next hearing in his case, set for early January.

The controversial exclusion of women from various settings in Israel because of pressure from ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders reached a new level this week with a major conference on gynecological advances that is permitting only males to address the audience.

The conference on Innovations in Gynecology/Obstetrics and Halacha [Jewish law] is being held by the Puah Institute this in Jerusalem. There will be many qualified female professionals, but none will be permitted to speak from the podium. Women are allowed in the audience, in a section separate from men.

At least two male Israeli doctors have withdrawn from making presentations at this week's Puah event once they were made aware of the exclusion of women, or at least once public outrage over the exclusion became apparent.

Several Israeli human rights groups have protested the men-only nature of the conference. While it is considered a private rather than a public forum, and therefore not subject to Israeli policies against discrimination, Puah receives considerable funding from the Health Ministry, these complainants point out. However this funding is unlikely to be under threat as the most senior health minister is in fact Ultra-Orthodox himself.

The Press Complaints Commission has rejected claims that a Jewish Chronicle (JC) column by Professor Geoffrey Alderman breached accuracy and discrimination rules.

His article about the segregation of men and women, published on October 29 2011, included the claim that it is well known that Charedi men are notorious harassers of the opposite sex.

According to one complainant the reference could not be substantiated and was inaccurate. But the PCC found that because the column was written from Professor Alderman's perspective, it was clear to readers that the content reflected his views and experiences.

The PCC also cleared the JC over the claim that it was discriminatory to suggest that Charedim were notorious for committing such acts. Chris Paget, a complaints officer at the PCC said:

The article did not make a prejudicial or pejorative reference to the religion of a particular individual, but rather expressed the columnist's views on Charedi men in general.

To come to an inevitably subjective judgment as to whether such material is tasteless or offensive would amount to the Commission acting as a moral arbiter, which can lead to censorship.