Yom HaAgunah 2026

I have been “celebrating” Yom HaAgunah, Agunah Day, since 1992, when it was first conceived by Professor Alice Shalvi, then acting head of ICAR – International Coalition for Agunah Rights. ICAR articulated the goal of Agunah Day clearly: to raise awareness for the “suffering” of the agunah and to“ find a solution” from “within the halakha.”

I have been waiting, as well as actively searching, for that halakhic solution for the past 34 years– first as an Israeli divorce lawyer, and then as the founder and director of both Yad L’Ish and the Center for Women’s Justice (CWJ), two not-for-profit initiatives that I started in response to the suffering of the agunah. It is with the hindsight of age and experience that I have now come to the conclusion – with all honesty, integrity, and sadness – that the solution has not come, and will never come, from “within the halakha.” Ever.

The only real help for the agunah comes from outside halakha– from secular courts and legislatures. And the only shift, however slight, that may occur from within the halakha is as a result of outside pressure and shaming of the halakhic system.

A recent case filed by CWJ, tried by attorney Yakov Katzin, and decided last month in a Jerusalem Family Court, proves my point.

On February 10, 2026, J. Roni Lev Ohayon of the Jerusalem Family Court ordered a Jewish husband to pay his Jewish wife close to 5 million NIS in damages for destroying her life by not giving her a get for the past 30 years or so. The Israeli rabbinic court had done everything it could to convince the husband to agree to a get. It “ordered” the man to do so. It put the man in jail when he refused to obey the order. It worsened the man’s condition in jail when he still refused. The rabbis took away the man’s canteen rights, his prayer shawl, phylacteries, and prayer book. It took away his bed (!) and made him sleep on the floor. It ordered that the man be placed into solitary confinement on numerous occasions. All this in the hope that it would coerce him to act reasonably and divorce his wife. He still refused. Once, when the man was brought in shackles to a rabbinic court for a hearing, he asked the rabbis if they were next going to take away his underwear. (He has a sense of humor.)

J. Ohayon did not say anything particularly new in her decision. Family Courts in Israel have long held that a religious right to withhold a get can become a civil wrong, entitling a person to damages, thereby constituting a tort. In 2001, J. Ben Zion Greenberger held that there is a cause of action for damages under Israeli tort law for get-refusal. He wrote that the refusal to give a get is an “ infringement of a woman’s personal autonomy caused by depriving her of her ability to determine the continuing course of her life with respect to those issues that are central to the life of any woman.” In 2004, J. Menachem HaCohen awarded a woman 425,000 NIS in damages. Since then, numerous family judges have done the same, expanding the tort to include cases in which a rabbinic court has not issued a formal “order” to a husband to divorce his wife, as well as to award damages against third parties who have aided and abetted the ensuing marital captivity. (It was my privilege as the head of Yad L’Isha and CWJ to have conceived and tried the 2001and 2004 cases described, as well as to navigate and oversee many of the subsequent ones.)

Israeli case law is not alone in condemning the act of marital captivity. All around the world, get-refusal is no longer seen as the unfortunate, but unavoidable, religious “privilege” of Jewish men. It is being reframed in secular jurisdictions and legislatures as: an act of “unclean hands,” a breach of contract, domestic violence, coercive control, the intentional infliction of emotional distress, a misuse of power, as well as a tort. In short, courts and legislatures are acknowledging that marital captivity is a civil wrong—a blight on society.

All this activity outside halakha has “scandalized” Jewish divorce law– reformulating it as something odious which must end. Nonetheless, all this bad press has not been enough to engender real change from within halakha. The best we have managed to achieve is limited rabbinic support for some prenuptial agreements, some of which are better than others.

Our client in the above case was 32 when she first asked for a get. She is now 62. She is still married. This is the sad reality of a patriarchal divorce regime that gives unilateral power to men. Our client’s stubborn husband was held in jail for almost 20 years and was only released after our client asked the rabbinic court to let him out. This is also the sad reality of a short-sighted legal system with no Constitution and little understanding of human rights, habeas corpus, or cruel and unusual punishment. To put it another way, this (never-ending) case proves that Israeli rabbinic courts will violate men’s rights to freedom to sustain a system that systematically violates the rights of Jewish women to autonomy and liberty.

Such a patriarchal, undemocratic, unfair, and unjust system should not be supported by the state, and certainly not enforced by it, as happens in Israel. A democratic state should condemn the abuse of religious privilege, as the Israeli Family Courts have done. It must protect human rights and dignity. It certainly should not impose religious rules on its citizens by making Din Torah (halakha) the law of the land, as it did when it passed the Rabbinical Courts (Marriage and Divorce) Jurisdiction Law of 1953.

In 1979, the feminist activist and poet, Audre Lorde, wrote: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” After 34 years, we agunah activists should have internalized this insight. A patriarchal system simply has no tools with which to dismantle the patriarchy. The patriarchy is, by definition, not democratic. Under patriarchy, women are not equal to men. And things are not fair. Or just. At best, the patriarchy can be tweaked.

It would behoove us Israelis to stop tweaking and stop looking in the wrong places for solutions. We need to learn the lesson of compromising with a patriarchal system at the expense of freedom and equality of women– and of men, as well.

And I would suggest that it is also prudent to expand this lesson beyond divorce law. From the perspective of a Jewish, feminist agunah activist, it seems clear that all attempts to interpret Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to be a Halakhic and democratic state, in whole or in part, will not and do not work.

But alas, in the current political climate, it would appear that such insight will not be forthcoming.