Israel’s Chief Rabbinate-affiliated batei din and the family courts are forced to deal again and again with complaints to the police, who are issuing restraining orders for tactical reasons to improve positions in marital disputes.

Tel Aviv Av Beis Din Rabbi Meir Freeman and Rabbi Meir Kahan published a harsh and aggressive ruling this week in which he ruled out a false complainant and ordered her to divorce. The court discussed the dispute between a Tel Aviv real estate man and his veterinarian wife, parents of two children aged four and two, and the husband filed a divorce suit, while the woman asked for shalom bayis.

It turns out that at one point the woman filed a complaint with the police, and the husband was then automatically expelled from his home for five days. Then the woman turned to the family court, which kept the husband away for 90 days from his house by agreement. In the end, the police and the State Prosecutor’s Office investigated the case thoroughly and after finding that the woman had threatened to file false complaints against the husband, it was decided to close the file for lack of evidence.

The woman who once demanded a divorce repeatedly and even filed a complaint with the police against her husband filed a request for shalom bayis this time for tactical reasons in order to receive economic benefits in the divorce.

In an exceptional judgment in which dayanim Freeman, Kahan and Rapaport, write: “If an unjustified complaint is filed, the consequences for the husband are unbearable, and by the police as a default, as well as a long-term harm in the process of issuing a protection order based on a mirror threshold weighing less than the weight of the quill. Take a safety factor for fear of violence, and even if at the end of the process the accused or the accuser will be acquitted – the very humiliation of the procedure harms his good name and, often, one’s name in one’s employment is without cure as the damage cannot be corrected.”

“The removal of a person from his home by false claims constitutes a violent violation on the physical level,” wrote the dayanim, “by forcibly removing him from his own home, while the complainant accumulates tactical profits in legal proceedings of determining custody, written fees, etc. Himself in a hopeless quandary without a solution”.

As a result of the harshness of complaints to police, the dayanim decided: “Therefore, it emerges from the statement that the woman must divorce and lose her alimony, the section and the written fees from filing the complaint with the police.”

It should be noted that the Av Beis Din of the Haifa Beis Din, Rabbi Yitzhak Ushinsky, added in regard to the ruling from Tel Aviv added in a ruling given last week that “the party that complains falsely is the loser and causes great damage”.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)