A couple appeared in a Haifa bais din asking for a certificate to affirm that they were married.
The husband explained that he had lost his ID and that a new one issued by the Interior Ministry had erroneously categorized him as divorced. But after digging into the archives, the bais din discovered that the couple had divorced some time ago.
The couple turned down the bais din’s suggestion that they could remarry, arguing that this might upset their adult children.
The bais din concluded from this bizarre give and take that the couple was attempting to achieve the best of both worlds by being simultaneously married and divorced. By judicious juggling of papers in Israel’s government bureaucracies, they hoped to gain retroactive benefits as both a married couple and a single parent family.
{Matzav.com Israel News Bureau}
Huh? Am I missing something?
Yes 3rd grader you are missing the fiscal benefits. This happens all over the world, except it’s not usually on matzav because it is civil marriage. The state realizes raising a child alone, and having to pay for a house, multiplied by two, has higher costs than doing the same as a married couple supporting each others, and sharing expenses. So, some couples file a divorce and there’s not much of a check on this (suspicious marriages e.g. for citizenship purposes are usually investigated), a spouse states being now resident, say, with parents, but in fact stays at the family home, and the family merrily goes on with some extra help from the government.
This case however is a little different, because they are trying to send different paperwork to different administrations, so that they get both the govt benefits for being a married couple with children, and those for being two single parents. And doing so retroactively, i.e. they hope to collect years of marriage benefits by showing the “mistake”. Something very close to fraud, by the way, and likely a crime.