Haifa, Israel - In Rare Ruling, Haifa Rabbinical Court Voids Marriage In Divorce Refusal Case -

vos iz neias

 In a significant and rare ruling, the Haifa Rabbinical Court voided the marriage of Oded Guez, a well-known divorce refuser, freeing his wife after more than four years as an agunah.

The ruling follows a groundbreaking ruling earlier this month by a private rabbinical court annulling the marriage of a woman who was an agunah for 23 years, although that was a more complex and controversial case and the ruling was more revolutionary from the standpoint of Jewish law.

The Haifa Rabbinical Court sealed the ruling and details of the decision and the reasoning in Jewish law behind it will not be made known.

The Guez case became notorious after rabbinical court rulings were issued for him to be publicly shamed and ostracized because of his divorce recalcitrance, and his continued defiance of the court and insistence that nothing would induce him to grant his wife a divorce.

Voiding a marriage is a rarely used tool by the state rabbinical courts, which finds fault with the original marriage ceremony or with another aspect of the wedding, which can then be used to retroactively void the marriage.

The court has, however, sealed its ruling and prohibited its publication, so exact details of the decision will not be known.

In the notification about the ruling, the court said specifically that the marriage had been voided, in a decision made by a two to one majority of the three-man panel.

The Rackman Center at Bar-Ilan University, which represents Guez’s ex-wife in the civil family court praised the rabbinical court “for freeing Ms G from her torturous marriage, expressing its hope that this brave ruling will present the way forward for many more to come in other hard cases of chained women.”