New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  It was 1958 in Montgomery, Alabama.

A group of black people made a request of the city administration. They asked to be able to use a public swimming pool that their own tax dollars had helped to build. The park system in Montgomery had a stunning municipal pool, one of the largest in the region. It was, however, open only to white residents.

The federal court agreed that the segregation was unlawful and, in 1959, ordered the city to integrate its recreational facilities.

Imagine if that horrific discrimination were to exist today – openly and publicly. Everyone would denounce it from the highest hills.

But, shockingly, it is happening today.

It is happening against observant Jews in Tel Aviv – where the basic freedom of religion in public places is not permitted. Gender separated minyanim are not permitted in public places in Tel Aviv.

But only for Jewish people. Muslims are allowed to pray in gender separated gatherings. Jews are not.

All this is happening at the direction of Tel Aviv’s mayor, Ron Huldai.  True, the mayor was a genuine war hero that risked his life fighting for Jewish life. But, sadly, this discrimination against those who wish to observe Torah-true Judaism – is an injustice and  travesty of the highest order.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” A city that denies to one faith the very freedom it grants to another has not preserved liberty for anyone. It has only chosen which of its residents it will apply things to – and which it won’t.

The Torah commands, “Ukrasem dror ba’aretz lechol yoshveha – And you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Vayikra 25:10). The verse does not say liberty for some of its inhabitants, or for the inhabitants a ruler happens to favor. It says lechol yoshveha – for all its inhabitants.

And the city of Tel Aviv has failed. It failed miserably.

This week, in a public space near the Jaffa Port, a mass Fajr prayer marking the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha was held in the open air, with full separation between men and women. The municipality did not stop it. The municipality did not fine it. The municipality looked on and let it proceed, as the record shows it has in previous years as well.

Yet the city told its Jewish residents, in the plainest possible terms, that gender-separated prayer would not be tolerated in the city’s public space. The position was stated as settled policy: after several discussions, a definitive decision that no event involving separation between men and women would be permitted in the public space of Tel Aviv-Jaffa..

The city would, in the official phrasing, preserve a free Tel Aviv. And when Jewish worshippers sought to gather under that same arrangement, the policy was enforced against them.

Two gatherings, identical in the only feature the municipality claimed to care about. Men and women, separated, praying in a public space. One gathering is forbidden and prevented. The other is permitted and ignored.

As Dr. King observed, “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.” A city that enforces its rules against one community while suspending them for another has built precisely such a dam.

Hilltop activist Meir Ettinger named the gap directly: the same municipality that opposed approving gender-separated prayer for Jews simply ignored the gathering led by the Islamic Movement. One need not share his politics to see that the observation is unanswerable.

A standard enforced against one group and waived for another is no standard at all. It is sheer discrimination.

Dr. King once observed that legality and justice are not the same thing. He said: “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal.’” A rule does not become just merely because an authority chooses to enforce it against some and not others.

The issue is equality before the law and the conduct of a mayor who has been caught applying its own rule to one population and excusing another. A government that does this forfeits the trust on which all of its other authority depends.

It teaches every resident, of every faith, the most corrosive lesson a government can teach: that the law is not a fixed standard but a flexible tool, bent toward whoever is favored and against whoever is not.

And Chareidim and other observant Jews – are not favored.

Years ago, Tel Aviv’s mayor, Ron Huldai, pushed this law against gender separated minyanim because he said “Tel Aviv must be a free city.”

But there is something called freedom of religion – freedom of worship. There is also something called freedom from discrimination.

If Tel Aviv is to be a great city, discrimination must be removed. It must be removed from every corner and every crowded street of Tel Aviv.

The office of the mayor cannot hold both positions at once and retain any claim to fairness. A mayor who enforces a standard selectively has, by his own hand, abolished the standard. The residents of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Jewish and Muslim and secular alike, are owed a city whose word carries the same weight on every street and for every community. They have instead been governed by a double standard, subversively ensconced and disguised in the language of freedom.

Dr. King taught that “the time is always right to do what is right.” For the mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, that time is now. The mayor, war hero that he may have been, must either repeal, or resign.

The author can be reached at [email protected]