Marriage and divorce in Israel: why succumb to practices that denigrate your rights?

I read Alona Ferber‘s account of her travails while preparing for marriage under rabbinic law in Israel with increasing frustration.

While sympathising to a degree, I wished she’d been able to plan her wedding day so as to avoid colluding with such reprehensible practices. I also wished her fiancé had kicked up a fuss with the rabbinate that might resonate with others in the same boat who could catalyse a national change.

Why any woman privileged with a sense of liberal democratic values would by default willingly denigrate her own rights, even notionally, has always been beyond me. Husbands who tacitly uphold this skewed status quo are in my opinion unmarriageable in the first place. The same can be said for any marriage contract in this country that permits the husband to offer or withhold a get.

When I get married in two weeks’ time, we are adopting a Jewish Humanist approach where both celebrants are equal: we will still smash the glass to symbolise that our joy is tempered by our collective losses as a people and as a family; instead of the chupah as a metaphor of our new home together (factually incorrect as we have already been living together for 20 years) we are using a wonderful book arch made up of various branches of human knowledge and endeavour, interleaved with glorious flowers to represent the natural world to which we are heir and to which we shall all return.

Let’s retain the beautiful and sane aspects of our culture and move on from the rest.

Wish me mazel!

Sarah Farrier-Rabstein, London N20

Halachah can never sanction the dissolution of a Jewish marriage, neither by a rabbinical court nor a lay one. of marriage agreed by the husband should be rigorously upheld.

Honouring one’s wife and providing for her maintenance are mandatory and should be halachically enforceable.

Hence, violation of these obligations that undoubtedly cause distress to one’s wife should be regarded as “criminal” acts and should be subject to payments of fines and damages.

Rabbi Lionel Broder,

London NW4

Like, no doubt most of your readers, I was appalled by your front-page report that Zvia Gordetsky’s husband has preferred to spend 16 years in jail rather than give her a get as ordered by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.

However, her supporter Alisa Coleman is incorrect to claim: “The rabbis of the Bet Din have to find a way of releasing her as her husband will never do it.”

It is not the rabbinate that is at fault since it has done every- thing permitted under Israeli law. The halachic way to deal with such recalcitrant husbands is to apply, in the last resort, the penalty of makkot mardut [flogging for contempt of court].

Might I suggest that the Knesset should pass a law that would allow for such flogging whenever a husband has spent a year in jail for get refusal.

Probably taking him to the place of flogging, stripping him and showing him the lash would be sufficient to make him change his mind. If not, the first lash might have the desired effect.

This could continue in extreme cases ad sheteitzei nafsho, as the Rambam rules, in which case his wife would be automatically released as a widow.

This procedure may be distasteful to Western audiences but, if they baulk at using it, they have no right for blaming the Rabbinate for the situation of ladies like Mrs Gordetsky. Martin D. Stern,

Salford M7