The invisible violence of divorce refusal in October 7’s shadow

“This is not really violence,” she told me, half skeptical, half resolute, “certainly not after everything we’ve seen and heard since October 7th. It’s not like they’re beating or abusing them,” she added, trying to explain her point. 

I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve heard such statements while attempting to illustrate the reality faced by thousands of agunot, “chained” women being denied a get, a Jewish writ of divorce, legally required to dissolve a marriage in Israel. It is a reality of violence in every sense of the word as these women deal with the long arms of recalcitrant husbands who continue to grip them forcefully against their will.

The agunot often also feel this way too, that their claims of violence are not taken seriously. In the surreal reality we’ve all been thrust into since that Black Sabbath—confronted with horrific stories of rape and sexual and physical violence as well as ongoing violence against the hostages that remain in captivity — agunot find themselves feeling the need to apologize for their cries for freedom, for their prayers for a life free from a sword hanging over their heads.

Paradoxically, the ongoing war has significantly worsened the situation for many victims of domestic violence and get-refusal. The sense of uncertainty and psychological pressure we all experience; the fact that many families have lost their homes and have found themselves crammed into small hotel rooms for over a year; and the economic distress of vulnerable populations have led to a notable increase in cases of violence and abuse. With each passing day, cases continue to accumulate, with more and more wounded and chained women arriving at our doorstep.

For many of these women who have left their husbands, violence is not foreign, but a reality spanning years. And now, after mustering the courage to escape from home, they discover the journey is not over – the abuse has merely changed its face. Now they encounter it again in the form of the husband’s refusal to grant a get and free them to continue their lives, a desperate final attempt to control them. Many also feel that society doesn’t understand their struggle for freedom. “We are captives without a campaign,” as one of our clients termed it.

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, marked today worldwide, is an important opportunity for all of us to tell every woman who was and remains a victim of any form of violence that we are still behind you –  today, and always. It is an opportunity for our society to remember not to allow the monstrous men who refuse to grant gets to blind agunot and society, making them view these women’s lives through the distorted prism they seek to impose. In the face of the most terrible occurrences of Oct.7 and the ongoing war, we as a society too often diminish or ignore other terrible wrongs that in a slightly less horrific reality would stand out for what they really are, and which we would fight with all our might.

If we continue this sort of accounting, attempting to rank the suffering of different women on a kind of “suffering hierarchy,” to decide who deserves more empathy or commitment, we have already lost. In a country that for three decades has prided itself on the Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty, we have let agunot lose the basic right to a free, dignified life. As a society, we have lost our standing on the values we believe in – the values of freedom, justice, and protection of those in times of distress.