Ohr Torah Stone | Features | Newsletter Winter 2006-7

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OTS Newsletter - Winter 2006-7

Moving Forward, Negotiating Obstacles

As the Monica Dennis Goldberg School’s Yad L’isha Legal Aid Center and Hotline nears 10 years of offering free legal representation to agunot – women trapped in abusive or unviable marriages by husbands who refuse to grant them Jewish divorces – the Knesset has succumbed to advocates’ pressure and established for the first time a subcommittee empowered to research solutions to the plight of these chained women. Batsheva Sherman, director of the legal aid center, has been named to the committee as the representative of ICAR, the International Coalition of Aguna Rights, of which Yad L’isha is a leading member.

The creation of the subcommittee represents a major stride on the part of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, explains Sherman. “Last year, the Knesset’s Committee on Advancing the Status of Women and the State Controller’s committee decided to meet with Israel’s chief rabbis about the issue of agunot,” Sherman explains. “Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi, suggested the establishment of a commission of Knesset members, rabbis and representatives of women’s organizations. It was the first time the Chief Rabbinate acknowledged that there was a problem in the way the rabbinic courts are handling many of these cases and the first time it recognized that we should work together to find a solution.”

The subcommittee, which will meet for the first time in the near future, will be extremely limited in its capabilities, as it will be unable to exert any kind of influence on rabbinic rulings. Still, Sherman believes that progress will be made in addressing the bureaucratic delays that often take place in the batei din, and the injustices that occur when a recalcitrant husband is able to extort payment or dictate conditions for child support and custody in exchange for granting a get. “There are three goals we are working to attain,” she says. “First, calling for ways to improve the situation in the rabbinical courts; second, stating clearly that a woman should never have to choose between her best interests and the interests of her children in order to obtain a get; and third, resolving that a woman’s right to divorce is the right to freedom. And freedom shouldn’t be a commodity that can be bought or sold.”

Yad L’isha on the Israeli Stage

The Monica Dennis Goldberg School's Legal Aid Center and Hotline, Yad L’isha, receives prominent mention in Mikveh, a new Israeli play that has been named Play of the Year by the Israeli Theater Academy. In the play, which tells the stories of a group of women who meet at the ritual bath, the woman in charge of the mikveh advises a battered woman to call the Yad L’isha Hotline for assistance with obtaining a divorce from her violent husband, an influential man in the community.

“I first learned about the Yad L’isha Legal Aid Center and Hotline a few years ago, when I spoke at the Knesset in a session devoted to women’s rights,” recalls the play’s author, Hadar Galron, a well-known actress, comedian and playwright whose work often focuses on religious feminist issues. “Someone gave me information about the organization, and it’s stayed in the back of my mind ever since.

“The work the advocates are doing is so important,” stresses Galron, who immigrated to Israel from England with her family as a child. “There is something so right about the way they’re dealing with the problems of Jewish divorce. It’s not an approach of fighting, but something far deeper and all-encompassing.”

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