At Rabbinical Court, Her Husband Accused Her of Cheating. Then She Lost Everything

Israel News All Liora at her son's home. She nevePr oimllsagTinreudm pth -i sR wohoaunldi bNee htaenr ylaifheu at 5H4e.z bCorlleadhit: GISiIl SE l-i aShyuria Adelson screaming Wikipedia At Rabbinical Court, Her Husband Accused Her of Cheating. Then She Lost Everything When Liora and her husband divorced, she never imagined that she would ﬁnd herself handcuffed and in a prison cell on the orders of a rabbinical court. Or that the divorce would leave her destitute Shany By Littman | Aug 08, 2019 Send me email alerts 174 Tweet Zen Subscribe ● Sex and the Jews: How the rabbis made it up as they went along ● In ﬁrst, Israeli court convicts husband refusing to grant wife divorce of criminal offense ● How a top Palestinian lawyer devoted to nonviolent resistance became a terrorist On the refrigerator in the apartment where Liora and her youngest son live are magnets with photos taken at family events, which capture moments of happiness in recent years. They’re the kind of pictures that can be found on refrigerators in the home of nearly every Israeli family. Everyone is well dressed and well groomed, in high spirits; the images seem to remind members of the household that life isn’t just mundane, everyday routine. For Liora (a pseudonym because a court order prohibits publication of the interviewees’ actual names), these mementoes of the past are especially meaningful, in light of her current situation. >> Subscribe for just $1 now After she divorced her husband, in 2013, the Great Rabbinical Court ruled that she was not entitled to half of the house in which the couple resided. Nevertheless, it decided she would share responsibility for hundreds of thousands of shekels in debt that she and her former husband accumulated during their marriage. And on top that, the court saw fit to accept her husband’s claim that she had cheated on him sexually. This is not what Liora imagined her life would be like at the age of 54: no property of her own, mired in debt, living in a rented apartment with her son. A preschool teacher, she works six days a week and every shekel goes toward repaying the debts. The furniture in the living room where we are sitting was donated by a colleague at work, she tells me. Liora borrows money from her daughter to buy birthday presents for her grandchildren. Her life has shrunk to one dimension: a battle to survive and achieve economic independence. Liora’s story is infuriating from many points of view. How is it possible that after 30 years of marriage, during which she gave birth to and raised three children, maintained a home and lived a full family life with her partner – she emerged destitute? How can the legal system allow such situations? At the same time, it’s disturbing to think that so many Israeli women don’t give any prior thought to their inherently inferior economic situation when they place control over everything related to property and livelihood in the hands of their partners, and their individual rights in the hands of the rabbinical court. Liora, who grew up in a working-class family in the north, was only 18, and still in high school, when she met Yoram. He was from the Haifa suburb of Kiryat Bialik, was about to be drafted and in the meantime was working as a photographer. After being together for four months – he lived with her in her parents’ home – they were married in 1982. “Yoram was amazing, I was very thrilled by it all, and we were just kids,” she recalls now. “Each of us had our own story. He was an only son. His parents died before we met.” Following their marriage, the couple went to live in a Haifa suburb in a small house that Yoram’s grandfather left him after moving to an old-age home. It was there that their three children were born. The marriage was “perfectly fine all along the way,” Liora says. There were family vacations and other outings as a couple and with the children. Following his army service, Yoram got a job with an electronics firm and then began working independently, buying a wholesale foods business. The money he invested in that venture came from a transaction involving the land on which his inherited house stood: He transferred the property to a developer, who demolished the house and built four townhouses in its place. Three of them were sold. In return for the land, Yoram and Liora received a few tens of thousands of dollars, and ownership of the fourth townhouse, where they lived for 20 years, until their separation in 2013. One of the legal lacunae that enabled Yoram to dispossess Liora was the fact that the dwelling was never formerly registered in their names. According to Liora, she was in charge of the interior design of the new home: She chose the kitchen, the marble surfaces, the floor tiles. Over the years the house underwent renovations, in all of which she had a hand. Liora recounts all of this to me in rather laborious detail, but then I realize that this is only part of the list she had to repeat time and again to the rabbinical court judges who determined the post-divorce division of property. “It was clear to the two of us all along that this house belonged to both of us. That’s how we treated it, and Yoram himself admitted it in court,” she says. “I never imagined the day would come when I would have to prove shared ownership of this house.” 'It’s hard for me to describe the feeling, that in a split second your life is taken from you and you’re in a closed cell under lock and key.' Liora The house was not listed in either of their names in the Israel Land Registry, a peculiar blunder for which Liora has no explanation. The same applied to the other three homes, and their new owners (and remains the case). After the developer who built them went bankrupt and fled the country, Liora and Yoram, as owners of the land, became the defendants in a civil suit filed by the other owners. Liora was a full-time homemaker: “My daughter was born with a cleft palate and underwent a number of operations, and my youngest son suffered from very serious asthma. I was home with them. At age 40, I went to college. I got a B.A. in education and sociology at Western Galilee College. I still hope to study for a master’s degree one day.” While she was studying, Liora began doing marketing work for the college itself. “I couldn’t afford not to work, of course,” she observes today. Yoram’s wholesale business ran up large debts and failed quite quickly. After working for some years for the National Lottery, he once more struck out on his own – this time selling slot machines. “During our years of marriage, there were bad times and worse times, but we lived well enough and managed,” Liora says. Eight years ago, after three decades of married life, relations between the couple began to sour: “Differences of opinion gradually emerged and we grew apart. We had matured, and each of us saw his direction differently. We lived in the same house, we managed a common household, there were Friday evening dinners with the children until the very end – we took turns cooking – and we ran a perfectly normal home, except that we slept in separate rooms.” Liora and Yoram in their youth. She was 18 when they met. At one point, however, says Liora, Yoram suddenly went to the Haifa rabbinical court and claimed she had cheated on him and was also violent toward him, and declared that he wanted a divorce. “He’s a very smart man and an expert in legal issues,” she explains. “When he decided that he wanted to get me out of the house, he went to the court without so much as a word and claimed I had been unfaithful to him and had hit him. He knew exactly which buttons to press. He was the biggest heretic, he hated religion with a passion – and suddenly he goes to the rabbinical court and claims he’s ill, unemployed and down and out. He used the allegation of adultery because he knew it would be effective with the rabbinical court, but there was no basis to it.” In Israel, under the 1953 Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction Law, two institutions are empowered to adjudicate divorce-related matters (as opposed to procedures relating to the actual divorce itself, sole authority for which resides with the rabbinical court system) and base their rulings on halakha (traditional Jewish law): the rabbinical court and the Family Affairs Court. The decision as to which of the two will handle a particular case depends on who institutes proceedings first. Because Yoram was first, and chose the rabbinical court, it addressed the issue of property division. ‘Dangling sword’ “The law stipulates that marriage and divorce are under the exclusive authority of the rabbinical court, which will pass judgment according to the Torah,” explains attorney Shay Zilberberg, from the Rackman Center for the Advancement of Women’s Studies at Bar- Ilan University (a legal-assistance clinic), who, along with Adi Raz, another lawyer from the center, is now participating in representing Liora. “The second thing the law stipulates is that if one of the parties brings various issues, such as property, into the divorce proceedings, the court thereupon acquires authority in regard to those issues.

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