Let be a connected closed region with smooth boundary contained in the d-dimensional continuous torus T d . In the discrete torus N −1 T d N , we consider a nearest-neighbor symmetric exclusion process where occupancies of neighboring sites are exchanged at rates depending on in the following way: if both sites are in or c , the exchange rate is 1; if one site is in and the other site is in c , and the direction of the bond connecting the sites is e j , then the exchange rate is defined as N −1 times the absolute value of the inner product between e j and the normal exterior vector to ∂ . We show that this exclusiontype process has a nontrivial hydrodynamical behavior under diffusive scaling and, in the continuum limit, particles are not blocked or reflected by ∂ . Thus, the model represents a system of particles under hard-core interaction in the presence of a permeable membrane which slows down the passage of particles between two complementary regions.