Mrs. Zvia Gordetsky, 53, who lives in Israel, has been an agunah for 17 years as her husband has refused to give her a get, preferring to remain imprisoned for the past 16 years. She and a number of others have been maintaining a hunger strike outside Knesset since last week.

Her case is back in the news because of the hunger-strikers and perhaps more so due to the fact that a bill that would permit the state to annul a marriage if a woman is denied a bill of divorce was pushed aside on Sunday, 11 Iyar. There is growing support for the bill as some liberal religious Jews along with traditional and non-religious feel it is time to come to the assistance of women who remain chained to their husbands against their will.

The bill is sponsored by MK (Machane Tzioni) Yael Cohen Paran, and she is quite aware it is most unlikely it will be passed into law. The Ministerial Law Committee has shelved it for months, sending a clear message of what the coalition has planned for the bill. Nevertheless, the bill increases public debate and there is growing support, perhaps out of frustration for the plight of agunos. Some women’s rights organizations view the process of a get as antiquated; and since they are not all religiously oriented, it leads to bill such as this to provide an alternative for woman who are trapped.

The bill states if either man or woman refuse to give or accept a get for the period of a year, the state may intervene.

Haaretz explains that the bill “would permit the state of retroactively confiscate the money used to buy the ring. That would ostensibly invalidate the marriage contract, since it means the payment would have been made with money that didn’t actually belong to the groom, and would hence be fraudulent”.

For Mrs. Gordetsky, this is not her first hunger strike, but it her first outside Knesset.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)