Coalition deal called catastrophic for ‘chained women’

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s concession to ultra-Orthodox parties in coalition agreements would spell disaster for agunot, chained women whose husbands refuse to grant them a divorce, according to Batya Cahana Dror, director of Mavoi Satum, an NGO helping chained women in the legal battle to receive a divorce.

According to the understandings reached in coalition negotiations, says Dror in a press statement, “the ultra-Orthodox rabbinical judges will have a clear majority in the Committee to Appoint Rabbinical Court Judges, and this will determine that the identity of many rabbinical courts will be Haredi and the future of hundreds of women will be one of continued suffering and abuse.”

“The dispute on control of the rabbinical courts exposes Israel’s political cynicism in its peak, where the greater good of the citizens of Israel, who need the rabbinical courts by law, is not at all considered by those who make up the coalition. Surrendering to the Shas demand to move rabbinical courts from the Justice Ministry to the Religious Affairs Ministry may be a last step toward losing control and monitoring the courts, where the situation is already bad as it is now,” writes Dror.

“Today the great appeals court in Jerusalem barely functions (there are no rabbinical judges). In regional courts, rabbinical judges do as they please, without any monitoring, no judicial norms and not due process. I am warning here against a loss of control and pending catastrophe in the rabbinical courts, at a time when the lives of so many Israelis depend on them,” Dror continues.