I've been an anchor for five years.
For five years I have been raising my two children alone.
My life is a life of hard work of survival.
First, to support my children and make sure they do not lack anything and secondly, to save myself from the prison that weaves around me the so-called "husband".
When you are an aguna then you have no rights.
You are erased from the map and swallowed up in the tangle of bureaucracy.
You are not a single mother, you are not divorced, you are not entitled to benefits or discounts or assistance with the children, you can not remarry - and who would want to go out with an aguna when this cloud hovers over it?
Not to mention bringing in more kids.
What mother would turn the tender child who had not yet been born into a bastard?
prison.
He is abroad "my husband". Everyone knows where he is, everyone knows how to get him. No one rushes to run him back to the country and imprison him. The same, five years I write under a pseudonym. I hide when in fact I have to shout with open face to the whole world my pain. Only last week the composition of three judges decided not to decide on my case. "Refusing a divorce under the auspices of the rabbinical courts. I'm in the air again.
Encourage gas,
When I read about the sentence of Oded Gaz, the divorcee who fled abroad, I grinned. 17 months imprisonment and compensation of 5,000 shekels. Who is it compensated for? His wife remained an aguna for six years. Schools, fuel and lifelong scars.How do you calculate the time of the woman who took her six years of life? You can not return and certainly not calculate.
17 months in prison, when a third will be deducted for sure, is less than a year.
A month and a half for each year of mooring.
Total makes sense.
This is not called justice.
"There is no price for freedom".
Right.
If you ask me there were times when I was willing and willing to give up everything, just to have my freedom.
But there are children in the picture, and there is a violent criminal here who has escaped his responsibility, and not on the conscience of the next woman and the children he will beat.
But for the court it does not matter.
Instead I stand again and again, repeating the same story, reliving the moments of violence again, just to convince the rabbinical court that I deserve a divorce.
Where does such a thing sound?
And what am I struggling with?
If the rabbinical court abuses me, and if the state decides to give such a light and miserable punishment to a person who refuses a divorce, encourage Gaz, then what can I expect to happen at the end of this struggle?
What hope can be conveyed to women who are refused a divorce and agunot, if even the penal system in the State of Israel eases its head with the perpetrators?
The legislature in the State of Israel must wake up and see the transparent women outside.
The legislature in the State of Israel must say out loud that refusing a divorce is a criminal offense punishable by a minimum of 3 years in prison.
The Legislature of the State of Israel must monitor that the rabbinical courts conduct a fair trial.
And most importantly - so that today's girls do not get hurt tomorrow - the legislature of the State of Israel must recognize prenuptial agreements and marriages outside the rabbinate so that no woman in the State of Israel will live in the prison I have lived in for five years.
Amit (pseudonym) has been an aguna for the past five years, accompanied by the "Dead End" organization - an organization that helps women who are denied a divorce and agunot.
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