It was a single tweet that propelled a 24-year-long protest at the most sacred site in the Jewish faith into the global spotlight. "So proud of my amazing sister and niece for their ballsout civil disobedience. Ur the tits #womenofthewall," wrote US comedian Sarah Silverman.

She was reacting to the arrest last Monday of her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman, and her 17-year-old niece, Hallel, after the pair, along with scores of other women, donned Jewish prayer shawls at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem's Old City in defiance of a ban imposed by the authorities and backed by a 2003 supreme court ruling.

Ten women were detained for several hours by police, and some were issued with temporary restraint orders forbidding them to visit the wall for up to 15 days. Rabbi Silverman later explained the basis for her protest. "Theologically, I oppose the Haredi [ultra-orthodox] ownership of Judaism. From a democratic point of view, it is simply a distortion that there is one group of citizens who rules the rest. The fact of the matter is that the Western Wall was hijacked by a small group," she told the newspaper Haaretz.

Women of the Wall has been demanding the right to pray on equal terms with men since 1988. It objects to the ultra-orthodox insistence that only men are permitted to wear prayer shawls and read or pray aloud. In the past few months, amid an escalating conflict in which the number of arrests has risen, support – both in Israel and abroad – has grown and the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has acknowledged the need for a solution.

In December he appointed former minister Natan Sharansky, a Russian Jew who was imprisoned by the Soviet regime, to find a compromise between the women's demands and the rules set by the rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz. Sharansky is expected to report in the spring.

Thousands of Jews pray every day at the Western Wall, the last remnant of the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, pushing scraps of paper bearing handwritten prayers into the cracks between its ancient golden stones. Men and women are forbidden from praying together; a small section of the wall is cordoned off for women.

The site, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, is also revered in the Islamic faith and is the home of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque.

Women of the Wall is "very modest in our demands", said its leader Anat Hoffman, who was a Jerusalem city councillor for 14 years. "We want [to pray] one hour every month, wearing a tallit [prayer shawl] and praying aloud."