The kiss heard 'round the Wailing Wall

Posted Thursday, February 24, 2005 at 3:56 PM Central

by John Couture

In Closer, Natalie Portman shed a few personal walls to play a stripper caught in a tangled web of sexual deceit that garnered the young actress her first Oscar nomination at Sunday's Academy Awards show. But in her latest movie, a single kiss (see right) is causing a huge uproar in her homeland.

The Israeli-born actress and the production crew of Free Zone were chased from where they were filming near the Wailing Wall by a group of Orthodox Jews. The group objected to the proximity of the kiss to Judaism's holiest shrine.

Men and women praying at the Wailing Wall are separated by a partition in keeping with traditional Jewish law that forbids casual contact between members of the opposite sex who are not related.