A Jewish man was convinced by a Rabbi to let his wife, who allegedly caught him in a homosexual affair, divorce him in early September, 14 years after she initially sought a divorce, reports The Jerusalem Post.
In Israel, marital issues of Jews are governed by the Rabbinic Courts. Under Jewish law, a husband has to willingly give his wife a bill of divorce, called “the get,” to release her from the marriage.
After discovering her husband’s affair, the wife initiated procedures with the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court to terminate the marriage. According to the Jerusalem Post, the husband refused to grant her the get for six years and evaded a rabbinical court ruling for another six years.
The husband was then sent to prison, during which time the wife sued him for monetary damages, prompting a litany of new legal disagreements and court proceedings.
After 14 years of evasion and delays, the case was brought to the Supreme Rabbinical Court in early September 2014. According to The Jerusalem Post, after a five-hour hearing before a panel of three judges, Chief Rabbi David Lau, acting as one of the judges, convinced the husband to drop his claims and grant the get in return for the wife dropping her lawsuit against him.
Attorney Batya Kehana-Dror, the director of women’s divorce rights group Mavoi Satum, said, “A woman is not obligated in any way to her husband to be free from her marriage. Rabbi Lau adopted basic democratic values, including the rights of women. He understood that there is a right to leave a marriage without paying for it, and that is the importance of this ruling.”
Many countries around the world have different laws governing people based on their religion. Another example is a recent divorce case in India when a man petitioned for a divorce from his allegedly abusive sex-addict wife. An Indian family court granted the man’s decree of divorce because it was uncontested by the wife, who did not appear in court to challenge his evidence.
In contrast, divorce in Thailand is generally regulated by the secular laws and is not based on religion. The only exception of this in Thailand would be the Islamic courts in the southern provinces of Thailand. Since Thailand secular law is based primarily on western civil law and common law principles, the requirements for divorce in Thailand are typically more flexible than many coinciding religious laws.
For example, there are 10 grounds for divorce under Thai law, and a spouse’s sexuality is not explicitly mentioned. Accordingly, discovering your spouse is gay in an ostensibly heterosexual marriage is not necessarily a ground for divorce. However, it may be possible to assert certain consequences of such an occurrence as a ground for divorce.
Read the full details of the Israeli divorce story here.
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