In Rare Move, Rabbinic Court Annuls Get 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 post-doctoral 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’Rabeinu Tam, a custom established by the 12th Century rabbi Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabeinu Tam, and which calls on the community to shun an offending Jew until he succumbs to justice.

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