Earlier this month an Israeli court decided that stores and restaurants can sell food banned by Jewish ritual law during this week’s Passover holiday. Israeli courts are often arbiters in quarrels between Israel’s influential Orthodox community and its secular majority. This time the ruling has angered the Orthodox.

Ritual Jewish law forbids consuming leavened products known as hametz– from bread to beer– during the week of Passover. The tradition commemorates the biblical Israelites who did not have time to let their bread rise before the hasty exodus from slavery in Egypt.

My article on the Passover debate discusses the details and consequences of the April 3 court decision that overturned the convictions of two restaurant owners, a grocer and the owner of a pizza parlor who sold hametz last year. The court ruled that restaurants and stores can serve hametz because they are not “public areas.”

The decision has been heavily protested, including by a 27-year-old Orthodox man who was arrested by police after he stripped off his clothes in a non-kosher supermarket near Tel Aviv to challenge the definition of “public areas.”

But this is just the latest episode highlighting the rift between Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel.

The courts and attorney general have already intervened several times this past year when Orthodox and secular interests collided, including in debates on religious-public bus lines and same-sex adoption.

Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary next month but is still trying to define its identity as a Jewish state.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a secular Jew, said she did not agree with the court’s decision.

“Most of us don’t follow all the commandments and I disagree with the (ultra-Orthodox) parties on many things, but we have an interest in protecting the values and symbols of a Jewish state,” she told her centrist Kadima faction. “Everyone’s talking about the 60th anniversary celebrations. Every child knows what democracy is, but when they are asked what is a Jewish state, people stand with their mouth agape.”

It’s been less than a month since an underground movement of gay Orthodox Jews in Israel went online and already tens of thousands of people have visited their Web site.

The site is called HOD (for Homo’eem Dateem or Religious Homosexuals), a play on the Hebrew word hod for glory. It’s the first to cater to gay men living in Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish minority, where homosexuality is viewed as a sin and people are often scared to admit publicly they are gay, fearing harassment or banishment.

Of course, not all of the online visitors fit into that category, said Rabbi Ron, one of the site’s creators. The site was flooded after local media reported on its inception and Ron, a gay Orthodox rabbi who asked that his last name not be mentioned, was interviewed on Israeli radio.

The Web site, written mostly in Hebrew but with pages in English as well, was the first of its kind and broke the taboo of discussing homosexuality from within the ultra-orthodox sector.

“Our main goal is to bring the religious gay community, as well as rabbis and leaders of the religious communities, relevant information and articles concerning our issue,” HOD says in its English-language section. “This way, we hope to reduce the hate towards homosexuals in the religious society. Moreover, HOD is your place to publish your opinions, stories and anything else you wrote related to this issue.”

Rabbi Ron told the Jerusalem Post the site aimed to break down stereotypes and foster dialogue: “We want religious people to know that we want to adhere to Halacha. But we also want them to understand that a homosexual is born the way he is and has no choice … Judaism’s main emphasis is on actions. We understand that, and we are not asking rabbis to permit anal sex or to make any changes in Halacha. We just want basic understanding.”

HOD is not the first website aimed at religious gays, Itay, one of the founders of the site, explained to Ynet : “Up to now the only website catering to the religious gay community was Atzat-Nefesh (here in Hebrew and English ), which was basically run by straight people that publicly stated that a religious person cannot be gay. They tried to ‘turn’ gay religious people straight, which is something that we know cannot be done. We try to help people reconcile their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation.”

This month, Israel’s attorney general ruled that same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children that are not biologically connected to either parent. The decision expanded the legal rights of gays and lesbian couples in Israel, where the Rabbinic Court has jurisdiction over marriage. Haaretz quoted a religious cabinet minister as calling the ruling “shocking and disgusting”.

The creators of HOD take a pragmatic approach in their attempt to gain acceptance from ultra-conservative religious leaders. By breaking taboo, they hope to gain awareness, which is the first step towards acceptance, Rabbi Ron said. Once that is done, maybe they can tackle the issue of making orthodox Jewish law less stringent, he said. The Web site declares: “You cannot ignore us any longer.”

One of the basic rules of journalism is to “be in the right place at the right time.” This is not easy to do when the story you want to cover happens only 10 or 12 times a year, at any one of dozens of locations indoors or outdoors and at any hour of the day or night. The odds were against me massively, but why should I let that get in the way when the story was as interesting as the Jerusalem Syndrome described in my feature “Come to Jerusalem, see the Messiah“?

Only about a dozen Jerusalem tourists per year suddenly get agitated, imagine themselves to be characters from the Bible, fashion makeshift togas out of hotel sheets and go out to holy sites to recite the Psalms, sing hymns or harangue passers-by to repent. There are enough anecdotes around to write a colourful story about the syndrome, but I wanted to get closer to the story. Maybe even see a syndrome sufferer first hand.

The sites that trigger the disorder were my first stop. I began in the narrow streets of the ancient city– a square kilometre crammed with some of the world’s holiest sites for Jews, Muslims and Christians.First I checked out a series of hostels that overlook the Arab market. Most of them had just one big room with guests from around the world spread out in 10 or so bunk beds. In the alley below, tourists haggled with shopkeepers for the best price on a hookah or a set of carved wooden camels.

Every hostel owner knew what I was looking for. Yes, they’d heard about tourists who were overwhelmed by Jerusalem’s intense religious atmosphere. Some had even witnessed a psychotic episode or two over the years. But there had been no crazy tourists recently, they said. They recommended I come back at Christmas or Easter.

A few hundred metres away, outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an Israeli police officer watched tour groups funnel into the hall believed to hold Jesus’s tomb. In the courtyard out front, Christian tourists walked past a large wooden cross leaning against a stone wall. The Muslim call to prayer echoed through the cobblestone streets. The officer, who asked that I not mention his name, told me that Easter pilgrims carry the cross along the Via Dolorosa, the route Jesus walked to his crucifixion.

The policeman had been stationed at the church for years and seemed to know more about its history than any tour guide. He told me how a few times he had dragged people from the church, those who had “lost their minds” after being overwhelmed by the holiness of the resurrection site.

He spoke with authority about the Jerusalem Syndrome, though much of what he said contradicted the facts and statistics I’d heard from Jerusalem psychiatrists. When I took out my notepad to write down some comments, he abruptly ended our conversation. He pointed me in the direction of the Western Wall and said I might have better luck there.

The march to the Western Wall, a remnant of the ancient Jewish Temple and one of Judaism’s holiest sites, took me through all fours quarters of the walled city - Christian, Muslim, Armenian and Jewish.

I sat in front of the exposed part of the Western Wall– which is about 50 metres (165 feet) long and about 15 metres (50 feet) high—and watched hundreds of worshipers congregate. Tourists pushed tiny prayer notes into the cracks between the stones.

Just last week, the site apparently proved so overwhelming for a young woman in her 20s that she stripped naked and lay on the group, muttering “the holy temple, the holy temple” and “it is all from God” while pointing at the sky. She was later sent to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

There was no repeat performance of that event as I sat observing the crowds at the Western Wall that day. I returned to different parts of the Old City several more times, and still never found myself in the right spot at the right time. But spending so much time in this unique conglomeration of holy sites, observing the pilgrims and chatting with the shopkeepers and police who encounter them every day, I understood how the atmosphere and intensity within the city walls could be overwhelming.