Women of the Wall gathers at the beginning of each Jewish month for a women’s Rosh Chodesh service at the Western Wall. Members had been arrested in the past for wearing prayer shawls because of a law forbidding any practice that falls outside of the wall’s “local custom.”

In April, a judge determined that the group’s activities did not contravene the law. Since then, none of the women has been arrested.

As in recent months, thousands of Orthodox girls packed the plaza adjacent to the wall and prayed quietly during Wednesday morning’s service, while police barricaded Women of the Wall at the back of the plaza, facing the wall but distant from it. A heavy police barricade, with up to six layers of fencing, a 15-foot buffer zone and two lines of police, separated the hundreds of women and male supporters from a crowd of mostly haredi Orthodox protesters who blew whistles, screamed and chanted insults. In the men’s section of the plaza, a man chanted prayers and psalms into a megaphone, disrupting the women’s service.

Last month, the women were barricaded in the plaza’s corner, far from the wall and next to a public restroom.

Women of the Wall have not been allowed to bring a Torah scroll into the service, but before entering the plaza, the group sang as one woman held a scroll at the plaza’s gate.

Recent months have seen a new status quo develop at the wall during Women of the Wall services. Orthodox girls arrive en masse and pray quietly next to the Wall. Police place Women of the Wall under a heavy barricade, and protesters try to interrupt them. While the protest at May’s service was raucous and violent, this time it was relatively tame, if dissonant. By time Anat Hoffman, the group’s chairwoman, blew the shofar, most of the protesters had dispersed.