Jerusalem, Israel - Jewish hardliners picked the wrong woman when they demanded that Naomi Ragen, an Orthodox Jew and a feminist author, move to the back of the bus on a muggy summer Jerusalem day in 2004.
"I said: 'Excuse me! If you can show me in the code of Jewish law where it's written that I can't sit in this seat, I will move, but until you do that get out of my face'," recalls Ragen.
"After that, I was harassed, humiliated and physically threatened for the entire ride," adds the New York-born Ragen, who still speaks with that city's brashy vernacular.
Ragen left the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, fold nine years ago when she grew weary of what she sees as the oppression women endured within the community. She remains, however, an observant Orthodox Jew.
Now Ragen is at the forefront of a lawsuit filed last week against the transport ministry and the Egged Bus Cooperative, which operates most public bus lines, demanding an end to the firm's 30 sex-segregated bus lines that relegate women to the back of the vehicle.
The first such lines began 10 years ago as a concession to the Haredi when they threatened to deal a financial blow to Egged by boycotting its busses.
Ragen and four other women, who say they too were verbally harassed and in some cases physically beaten on busses by these black-coated Jewish hardliners, are fighting back against what many say is the creeping radicalisation of this community.
The Haredi sects originated in the ghettoes of eastern Europe, following individual rabbis who were often regarded as messianic-like figures by their ultra-devout and fundamentalist followers. Members shun secular society and the men lead a life of piety and prayer.
In recent months, some Haredi men have run what are dubbed "modesty patrols" that have splattered bleach on women they consider dressed immodestly in Jerusalem's black belt, a string of Haredi neighbourhoods along the city's northern edge.
And last week, leading Haredi rabbis set ablaze piles of sheer stockings -- an affront to a community whose women must show no exposed leg -- in a public bonfire.
In perhaps the most controversial ruling of late, a leading rabbi declared in January that Haredi women could no longer attain academic degrees past high school.
It was a devastating blow to a community where women increasing seek work outside the home to support their families while men remain in secluded seminaries studying the Torah, or Jewish scriptures, earning a pittance.
The ruling also prompted a rare public outcry by some Haredi women against their otherwise infallible rabbis.
"This is the Talibanisation of my religion," says Ragen, well-heeled, expensively dressed and tough enough to crack walnuts.
"This has nothing to do with the Jewish religion. This is about control of women."
The growing number of segregated public bus lines -- from two to 30 in the decade since their creation -- is also seen as evidence of the Haredi community's mushrooming political influence.
Israel's parliamentary system which fosters coalition governments often leaves a handful of Haredi lawmakers in the role of kingmakers. This has given them influence far beyond their numbers, which today represents 10 percent of Israel's population.
Gays have been another target. Haredi youths staged nightly riots when gay rights activists tried to organise a parade through Jerusalem last autumn. Political leaders and police eventually relented and the march's organisers were forced to hold a toned-down gathering in a nearby stadium.
And when a one-day transit strike forced Israel's national air line, El Al, to fly on the Sabbath to make up for lost time, the ultra-Orthodox launched a boycott that had the carrier grovelling for forgiveness.
"They control everything, buses, planes, schools," says Ori Cohen, 24, a pony-tailed art student in Jerusalem who gave up a lifestyle of ultra-Orthodox piety to devote himself to his painting.
Supporters cast Ragen and those like her as modern day Rosa Parks, the US civil rights icon who famously refused white demands that she sit in the back of the bus.
On the flip side, Shira Leibowitz-Schmidt, a teacher at the Haredi College for Women who has fought back against Ragen, says sex-segregated bus lines uphold Haredi traditions and values.
The vocal demands for modesty and heightened restrictions on women, she says, are a natural reaction to the midriffs and spaghetti-strapped tank tops worn by many secular Israeli women.
"It goes back to the spiralling permissiveness and creeping eroticism, this lasciviousness in the public square," says Leibowitz-Schmidt.
"Women want to encourage their husbands, sons and brothers to be focused on family and on Torah and not on the barely dressed women entering the bus."
Long-time observers of the Haredi say their recent hardening of postures toward women in that community is a reaction to Haredi women's growing assimilation into secular Israeli society.
The arrangement that allows Haredi women to venture into the secular workplace has notably widened the gender rift, according to sociologist Menahem Friedman from Bar-Ilan University.
"Women went out into the big wide world and got jobs, and their eyes were opened up a little bit about the world and their place in it, whereas the men's education and unworldliness stayed the same," says Friedman.