Belgium arrests Israeli who won’t divorce his wife

28 July 2016, 7:22 pm

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Police in Antwerp, Belgium arrest Oded Guez, a Israeli professor who refuses to grant his long-estranged wife a divorce under Jewish law.

Guez is suspected of using a forged passport and assuming a false identity to leave Israel after he was ordered by the courts to grant his wife the divorce she has been seeking for years, Haaretz reports.

He disappeared in April, after the Rabbinical High Court excommunicated him in an effort to pressure him to agree to the divorce.

Jewish Women who are not given a get, or Jewish divorce, are called agunot or “chained women,” as they cannot remarry according to Orthodox religious law. Religious judges do not have the authority to nullify marriages of reluctant husbands.