A municipal swimming pool just recently opened in Efrat. The designers worked hard to figure out a way to balance the desire for family swimming while also allowing for religious sensitivities against mixed swimming to be adhered to...

While most pools in such mixed communities will designate hours for mixed swimming and hours for separate swimming, in Efrat they decided to innovate and they came up with the creation of a built in mechitza that has be raised from the bottom of the pool and lowered back down when no longer needed. With the pool being 8 swimming lanes wide, the mechitza down the middle will leave four lanes for men and four for women when the wall is up.

It seems to me to be a lot of innovation for one benefit - lowering the wall for the hours of family swim makes it like any other pool with no mechitza that has hours for family swim. Raising the wall means women and men can swim at the same time but separately rather than having to schedule men at a certain time of day and women at a different time of day. I guess the same could have been accomplished by building two pools. I wonder which would have been cheaper, though the idea of a wall in the pool that goes up and down is cool.

JPost has a picture of it, though the picture just looks like a swimming pool with a wall. they should have taken a picture where you can see both sides of the pool with the wall in the middle...

UPDATE:

Minister Yariv Levin, acting Minister of Religious Affairs, confirmed this is not accurate. After looking into it it seems this was an initial draft with the clause being included in contracts for all government property but was removed from the contracts with shuls already a few months ago...

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The City of Tel Aviv is renewing land leases for different organizations operating shuls on city property. These are shuls that never completed their registrations with the Land Registry. The new contracts that would allow the shuls to continue to operate include a clause never before included.

The clause stipulates that the synagogues must provide religious services to all neighborhood residents, regardless of age, gender, or belief.

The various shuls leadership/boards are concerned this would in essence prevent them from functioning as an Orthodox shul and would open them up to lawsuits of discrimination for having a mechitza and for nor offering Muslim prayers, and the like.

Some shuls have already refused to sign this new contract and have been given eviction orders.

source: Hamechadesh

Whatever they are trying to do, I suspect it is going to backfire and there will be a backlash against the city's efforts. If groups want to open Reform or Conservative shuls and have mixed seating or multi-denominational services, they should open those as they see fit, but I dont think forcing this on Orthodox shuls is going to work. 

In past years when they did not want to allow public prayer on the High Holidays in public areas due to gender discrimination, they justified it by saying there are plenty of shuls all around Tel Aviv offering traditional services. And now they are running a campaign to stop the shuls from offering those traditional services?

According to Michaeli, if Netanyahu puts together a government of 61 mandates, it would include just 9 women - the lowest number of women in a Knesset in many years. Michaeli says this points to "the side of Netanyahu" rejecting the basic principle of gender equality. Michaeli claims that the Labor party is the only party in Knesset that has implemented equal representation of men and women.

This has been spoken about before but the Haredi parties have always found a way to avert it as they are staunchly opposed to including women on their party lists. Even if they would be granted some sort of religious exemption, such a law would help boost female representation among the other parties that already have women included but very few.

The big question, if no religious exemption would be granted, is how UTJ and would deal with such a law. appealing to the Supreme Court is obviously the main first step, but this question is supposing they do that and the Supreme Court upholds the requirement (which itself is not a sure thing).

I see three possibilities, and feel free to add your own, the funnier the better.

1. they comply and add women equally to the men on the list. Not likely to happen, but if forced to, perhaps

2. they comply and add women, but doing so by stacking the list with 60 men in the first 60 slots and then 60 women in the next 60 slots, to fill out the party list of 120 potential MKs. This would be cute, and for them this too would also be a precedent and a massive change, even though they are all in unrealistic spots. What would be even funnier is if the public were to massively vote for UTJ just to get some of the women in slots 60+ into Knesset as UTJ representatives.

3. half the men on the UTJ declare themselves as identifying as women. This could work, but I doubt UTJ would do that, even in jest.

I think it might be worth massively voting for Labor right now just to see what happens with this...