Woman granted divorce ten years after husband cut contact
Once their marriage was finalized, she became aware that her new husband had serious financial problems he expected her to help handle.
By EVE YOUNGTHE RABBINICAL court of Tel Aviv. It has been said that rabbinical courts allow men to hold back consent to divorce their wives in order to extort the women into agreeing to unfair overall terms.(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
A woman was granted a get (Jewish divorce document) this week after 10 years, and is free to pursue fertility treatments on her own terms. The woman, who asked to be identified only as "D," worked to obtain the get from a man who flew to Argentina soon after their marriage and cut contact with her soon after that.D met the man in Eilat. When she was diagnosed with cancer, he would accompany her to medical treatments and offered to help her through the process of freezing embryos by marrying her.Once their marriage was finalized, D became aware that the man had serious financial problems and expected that she would help handle them.A few weeks after leaving for Argentina, the man cut ties with D. She was able to reach him a few times by phone and demanded he grant her a divorce. He refused and D did not hear from him again for another six years.D's cancer went into remission and, with the approval of the court in Israel, she began to attempt to become pregnant.Two years ago, D reached out to Yad La'isha, a legal aid center for agunot ("chained" women). The center's lawyer and Rabbinical Court advocate Tehila Cohen reached out to the man's family in an attempt to pressure him into granting the get. A lawyer representing the man made contact and the man agreed to grant the divorce on condition that D would not use the embryos that they had frozen as a couple.This would have ended D's attempts to become pregnant, and so negotiations between the parties continued until the man agreed to allow her to continue to use the embryos and grant her the get."The fact that [D] was already dealing with cancer and the frustration of trying to have a child – and at the same time she was trapped in this marriage – is completely unforgivable," said Pnina Omer, director of Yad La’isha."It is time that we find a solution within Jewish law for the plight of these trapped women, which is robbing so many of the chance to become mothers, to find love in what is essentially ‘halachically-condoned isolation’. This is an unacceptable phenomenon that simply can’t continue to be ignored."According to Rabbinate records, there are at least 400 women who have been refused a get in Israel, but the real number is impossible to know, according to The Jerusalem Post's sister publication Maariv.
This is partly because a case will be marked as closed if no progress has been made in a year – meaning that there could be many cases in which no progress has been made, and a woman who is refused a get will therefore not be counted in the Rabbinate's records.
