In Rare Move, Rabbinic Court Annuls Divorce Refuser’s Marriage

Five years ago, a young Israeli woman identified in court documents only as G, decided to end her marriage. It was, the documents show, an abusive relationship, with G moving out of her home and into a shelter for battered women. But when she asked her husband for a get, the Jewish divorce document, he refused, turning G into an agunah, a halachic term for a woman who is chained to her marriage, a predicament that currently plagues hundreds of Jewish women around the world. Yesterday, in a rare move, a rabbinic court in Haifa annulled G’s marriage, declaring her not a divorcee but a never-married woman.

G’s ordeal is one of the most prominent cases of get refusals in recent memory. After he husband, a physics professor named Oded Gez, refused to sign the divorce papers, G embarked on a campaign to win back her freedom. She managed to get Tel Aviv University to dismiss her husband from his postdoctoral fellowship, but he disappeared soon thereafter and failed to show up at any of the subsequent hearings scheduled by the rabbinic court. The court then took the uncommon step of issuing what is known as harchakah de’Rabbeinu Tam, a custom established by the 12th-century Rabbi Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabbeinu Tam, and which calls on the community to shun an offending Jew until he succumbs to justice.

The court allowed the public disclosure of Gez’s name and photograph, and called on the community to refuse him any privileges.

“Every man and woman in Israel mustn’t come into contact with him,” read the court’s decree, “neither in commerce nor for a meal, neither to visit him on his sickbed nor to permit him into the synagogue, let alone honoring him with reading from the Torah. He must not be allowed to say kaddish or pass before the ark. No one must inquire after him or pay him any respects until he retracts his recalcitrance, listens to the opinions of his teachers, and gives his wife a get according to the religion of Moses and Israel, releasing her from her status as an agunah.”

Unmoved, Gez tried appealing to Israel’s Supreme Court, but was rejected. Facing arrest, the punishment set by law to anyone refusing to grant their spouse a get, Gez, using a fake passport, fled Israel, going first to Cyprus, then to Uman in Ukraine, and, finally to Belgium, where he was arrested after a prolonged manhunt involving Interpol. He is currently in the process of being extradited to Israel.

Meanwhile, working to free G of her bind, the rabbinic court took the exceedingly rare step of annulling the couple’s marriage. The ruling, the court said in a statement, was supported “by the greatest rabbis adjudicating such matters.” Rabbi David Malka, director of the Rabbinical Courts Administration, told the Israeli press that he was “happy one of the most difficult cases of agunot the rabbinic courts system has ever dealt with has come to an end. The verdict proves again that the court will do everything in its power, both operationally and halachically, and leave no stone unturned to bring justice to all the agunot in Israel.”