Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1951, Rachel Kagan, a member of the fi rst Knesset and one of the two women to sign
the Declaration of Independence — along with Golda Meir — sponsored the Equal Rights for
Women Act. It called for gender equality before the law, including the right to sign contracts,
own property, and bring lawsuits. In her initial draft of the legislation, Kagan included a provi-
sion for civil marriage and divorce. David Ben-Gurion told Kagan that he could not support
that provision because of his promise to give the Rabbinate control over those personal status
issues. The bill passed without that provision, but Kagan voted against it in protest.
Under Jewish religious law, women cannot be rabbis or witnesses at weddings, but a woman
is most vulnerable when divorce occurs. The man must give a get (the divorce document) to the
woman, who needs this paper in order to remarry. Sometimes men withhold this document to
make the wife forgo fi nancial support or even child custody. If the husband cannot be found
or he is mentally incapacitated, a get cannot be provided. The only way for a woman to obtain
a divorce in such cases is to have the marriage dissolved by the rabbinical courts. But all the
judges are men, and women are not allowed to give evidence. On the other hand, a man whose
wife does not accept the get —because she is unwilling, missing, or mentally ill— can obtain a
divorce and remarry with permission from 100 rabbis, a diffi cult but not impossible process.
To address the double standard, at least in part, legislation was passed in the late 1990s en-
abling rabbinical courts to punish men who refused to give their wives gets by canceling their
drivers' licenses, passports, and credit cards or even sending them to jail. But women in such
situations wait an average of three and a half years to get a divorce and sometimes as long as ten
years. One source estimated the number of such cases at 10,000 in 2003, although according
to a rabbinical court statement in 2007, the annual number of such cases is less than seventy.
The second woman to sign the Declaration of Independence was Golda Meir, who, in 1969,
became the third woman in the twentieth century to be an elected national leader and the fi rst
to do so without ties to a famous father or husband. Among her earlier posts were ambassador
to Russia, minister of labor, and foreign minister.
Israel's modern feminist movement began with two Israelis who had emigrated from the
United States and were then teaching at the University of Haifa, Marcia Freedman and Marilyn
Safi r. They started courses on women's issues and opened the fi rst day-care center on campus.
A series of other fi rsts followed — a women's bookstore, a feminist conference in Israel, a shel-
ter for battered women, and women's magazines.
In 1973, feminist activists joined forces with Shulamit Aloni, who had fought and been
captured in the War of Independence and who was later a Labor Party Knesset and cabinet
member. She was a founder of the Citizens' Rights Movement, a political party that sought
civil marriage and divorce in Israel, among other things. When Freedman and Aloni were
elected to the Knesset, they pushed issues of importance to women's activists, including legal
abortion and awareness of domestic violence.
In 1985, Alice Shalvi, a Dati professor of English at Hebrew University, became chair of the
Women's Lobby, an umbrella organization for feminist activity in the country. In 1997, the
group became the Israel Women's Network (IWN), the central nongovernmental group lob-
bying for women's rights.
Some of the greatest gains for Israeli women have been made through the Supreme Court.
In 1988, the court agreed that women could participate in choosing the chief rabbis of cities
 
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