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OTS Newsletter - Summer/Fall 2005Fighting for Fairness in Court, Knesset and SocietyMonica Dennis Goldberg advocates continue to make inroads in the uphill battle for justice and equality, seeking innovative and comprehensive solutions in Israel and around the world to end the agunah crisis. Eight short years after OTS’s Monica Dennis Goldberg School for Women Advocates opened the Max Morrison Legal Aid Center and Hotline for women seeking Jewish divorces from recalcitrant husbands, statistics clearly indicate that the institution has sparked an unprecedented revolution within Israel's rabbinical court system. A study recently published by Bar Ilan University’s Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women reveals that in 1997, the year Yad L'Isha was first established, the courts obligated only seven husbands to release their trapped wives from the chains of an abusive or dead marriage. But in the year 2003, with Yad L'Isha well established and its women advocates firmly entrenched in the field, the number of men compelled by the courts to issue a divorce had skyrocketed to 229.
As Yad L'Isha continues to challenge unsound rabbinical court rulings and unnecessary bureaucracy that still allow many husbands to withhold divorces - preventing their wives from remarrying and rebuilding their lives - the Center has positioned itself unwaveringly in the forefront of legal, political, social and educational activism to achieve a comprehensive solution to the problem of agunot. Those efforts are also international, explains attorney Batsheva Sherman, who assumed the Yad L'Isha directorship in July 2004. “We are now working to obtain the signatures of community rabbis across Europe, North America and South America on a declaration stating that their communities will not shelter or protect sarvanei get - husbands who are refusing to grant their wives a Jewish divorce and have fled Israel in order to escape incarceration and other legally-sanctioned coercion," she relates. The document will reinforce the cooperation with community leaders that is already an important tool for Yad L'Isha in resolving difficult cases. "We recently helped a woman obtain a get, after 11 years, from a husband who ran away to Mexico and actually became a popular rabbi there," Sherman continues. Working in cooperation with the rabbinical placement department of Ohr Torah Stone’s Joseph Straus Rabbinical Seminary, Yad L'Isha located a spiritual leader in Mexico who agreed to publicize that the husband was being sued in Israel for withholding a divorce from his wife. The husband agreed to grant the get in exchange for ending the negative publicity. Laws to Protect Women and Children
Closer to home, Yad L'Isha is lobbying in Knesset for the enactment of a series of laws that would protect the personal status of women, limit the jurisdiction of the Israeli rabbinical courts, and enforce clear separation between granting a divorce and custody or child support, in order to discourage the blackmail that so often sets conditions for a get. Batsheva Sherman is currently serving on a committee appointed by the Knesset to research the feasibility of a proposed law that will require separate legal representation for children in custody cases where the husband's demands create conflict between the good of the mother and the children's best interests. “In cases of this kind, a woman's lawyer will often pressure her to give in to her husband's unreasonable demands, even though these demands may actually be detrimental to the children," Sherman explains. “A woman should never be made to feel torn between the welfare of her children - issues of custody or child support, for instance - and the opportunity of finally attaining her own freedom. This law will protect the children by separating their concerns from the parents’ battle over the get.” As the Knesset wrestles to formulate far-reaching child welfare laws, Sherman says, Yad L'Isha is stressing the urgency of this legislation and lobbying for its immediate passage. Yad L'Isha also continues to file civil court cases that reinforce the work of its advocates in the rabbinical courts. In this way, Yad L'Isha advocates set a legal precedent when a civil court judge acknowledged, for the first time, that loss of one's personal freedom at the hands of a recalcitrant husband is legal grounds for suing for damages. This year, in the first resultant settlement based upon this new Cause of Action, a 12-year aguna was awarded significant financial compensation by the civil courts for her longtime suffering. The Basis for Change Still, says Sherman, implementing extensive change requires more than legal action: it demands cooperation from dayanim (rabbinical court judges) who are more sensitive to the problems of Jewish divorce today. “Six new dayanim will soon be appointed to the rabbinical court by a committee that is composed of Knesset members, Israel's chief rabbis, various lawyers and other dayanim," she reports. "We are working together with the International Coalition of Aguna Rights (ICAR) to raise awareness among committee members on this crucial issue. We have already effected, for the first time, the inclusion of a woman activist lawyer on that committee. Now we are encouraging them to appoint dayanim who are open to social change and ready to fight for it.”
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