According to statistics released by the Israeli rabbinate, the number of wives refusing to accept gets for a period of a month or longer outnumbered husbands refusing to grant their wives gets.
The figures revealed that 56,000 couples divorced in Israel from 2012 until 2017. Of 6,950 cases in which it was necessary for a beis din to intervene, 3,566 cases involved uncooperative husbands and 3,384 involved uncooperative wives. Most such cases were settled within a month or two. Of 809 cases where spouses refused to cooperate for a longer period, 382 concerned uncooperative husbands and 427 concerned recalcitrant wives.
However, an attorney for the Center for Women’s Justice which advocates on behalf of agunos noted that the numbers for recalcitrant husbands did not include files closed prior to 2012 or cases where women filed for a divorce but could not cite halachically adequate grounds for a get. The figures also didn’t include women who sued for damages in civil court or refused to pay financial settlements imposed by a beis din.
During the 2012 to 2017 period, 69 husbands were imprisoned for refusing to give gets, including a husband who was jailed for fourteen years. During the same period, 53 husbands were permitted to remarry without giving their first wives a get due to special circumstances such as illness or insanity.
“The data indicate that the number of permits issued to marry a second wife is tiny,” said director of the botei din Rav Shimon Yaakovi. “They involve slightly over ten cases yearly among the eleven thousand divorces granted per year. The figures also show that divorce refusal is not exclusive to one gender and that more men are subject to get refusal than women. Although multi-year data indicate that divorce refusal occurs in only about 1.5% of divorces, every day delayed in arranging a divorce when a get is refused is inappropriate and is one day too many.”
{Matzav.com Israel News}
Well this is a politically incorrect and inconvenient headline.
Just because this is the case in Israel doesn’t mean that the same applies to Jews all over the world
It’s a real chutzpah that you speak this way of bnos yisroel. It is my job to defend them, even if I slander innocent people along the way. And you have no right to publish such an article, since it offends my sensibilities. This needs to be a safe space.
Yeah and worst case scenario the man can just get a heter and get married again whereas for a woman she’ll be an aguna forever if the man wants. The two are not at all comparable.
Yep, a real heter meah is easily attainable?! It used to be easier – for $25,000 – before the feds closed down some shops.