up.

This week, MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid) held her annual discussion in the Knesset committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women for International Agunah Day. The debate centred on halachic prenuptial agreements designed to prevent women being chained in Jewish marriage. Present were members of Knesset, experts on Jewish law, rabbinic court advocates, lawyers, activists, formerly chained women, and agunot, women who await their bill of divorce from a husband who refuses to give one, or who truly cannot.

Notably — glaringly — absent was every single possible representative of the Israeli Rabbinate and the rabbinic courts, the very entities that maintain the circumstances that trap women (estimated in the thousands), as well as men (estimated in the hundreds), in marriages they do not want. The rabbinicshould be widespread use.

And there is true communal need. In one of the most powerful moments of the two-hour session, during which women whose lives have been devastated by get refusal recounted their painful stories, Yad La’Isha director Pnina Olmer read aloud the “Profile of a get-refuser” that she and her team of lawyers who represent mesuravot get in rabbinical court crafted in response to an oft asked question:

“...A get refuser is a poor man, a rich man. He is religious or secular. He is an accountant who fled the the Rabbinical Court and disappeared, and a doctor who married a second wife and then a third, while keeping his first wife an agunah. He is a pilot who fled to Hong Kong, leaving his wife to raise