Official finding Jewish institutions and contexts Other Jewish institution or hearing Israel · 2017

Israel: the UN women's rights committee identifies 'get abuse' — husbands withholding religious divorce — as psychological violence, in a system where only a rabbinical court can dissolve a Jewish marriage

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the rabbinical courts, which hold jurisdiction over the dissolution of Jewish marriage in Israel, husbands who withhold consent to the get, the religious bill of divorce, without which the marriage cannot be dissolved

Organization

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, State of Israel, Rabbinical courts of Israel

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The religious warrant is Israel's reservation to article 16 of the Convention, which the State party explains by reference to the autonomy of religious communities over religious practice, and under which jurisdiction over the dissolution of a Jewish marriage rests with the rabbinical courts applying halakhah. Because a Jewish marriage in that system can only be dissolved by a get that the husband must grant of his own will, the religious rule itself is what converts a husband's refusal into an indefinite legal trap — the Committee treating that withholding as a form of violence.

Religious marriage or family control
Institutional obedience or isolation
Sacred sex, purity, or sexual-energy claim

Scope decision

This record relies on CODEBOOK §11 (fused religious-state authority) and is coded fusedAuthority: true. The provision supplying the religious warrant is stated in spiritualNexus: Israel's reservation to article 16, and the rabbinical courts' jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce that it preserves. It is included in part to satisfy guard rail G2, which requires the clause to be applied evenhandedly and not as an instrument aimed at one religion; the same reasoning that admits records concerning Islamic personal-status law admits this one. This is an official finding by a United Nations treaty body, not a criminal proceeding: nobody was prosecuted, no court has adjudicated anything recorded here, and no individual is named or accused. The record concerns a legal structure and a documented pattern within it, not any particular husband, rabbi or court. The Committee's finding about restrictive religious interpretations refers to stereotypes persisting 'in particular among ultra-Orthodox Israelis'; that is the Committee's own wording and is not an assertion by this archive about any community's beliefs. The Committee expressly welcomed the 2012 amendment to the Rabbinical Courts (Enforcement of Divorce Judgments) Law and the strengthening of the family courts, recorded here so the finding is not read as one of unrelieved failure — sanctions against husbands who refuse a get do exist in Israeli law. The Committee's separate findings concerning polygamous and forced marriage among Arab and Bedouin communities are not part of this record. The observations describe Israel as at 2017.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2017-11-17 · concluding observations adopted

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (treaty body established under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women). In its concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Israel the Committee identified among forms of gender-based violence 'psychological violence and abuse by husbands against their wives during divorce proceedings through the withholding of consent to divorce (also known as get abuse)'. It further recorded concern that 'married women who are unable to divorce because they have not received the get continue to suffer stigma and discrimination when they bear children by men other than their husbands', and that 'discriminatory stereotypes based on restrictive religious interpretations concerning the roles and responsibilities of women and men in the family and in society persist, in particular among ultra-Orthodox Israelis'. On the legal framework, the Committee noted with concern that Israel maintains its reservations to articles 7(b) and 16 of the Convention, recording the State party's explanation that these 'relate to the very fabric of Israeli society, which comprises many religions, each having varying degrees of autonomy with regard to certain religious practices', while observing that national courts have invoked article 16 and that family courts already deal with various matters of family, marriage and divorce law, which in the Committee's view indicates the reservations can be withdrawn. It welcomed the 2012 amendment to the Rabbinical Courts (Enforcement of Divorce Judgments) Law and the strengthening of the family court system.

Documented coercion mechanisms

a religious divorce that cannot be granted without the husband's consent, leaving the wife unable to remarry
the withholding of that consent as leverage during divorce proceedings
continuing stigma and discrimination against women who bear children while unable to obtain a divorce

Cited record

Sources

un treaty body concluding observations United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Israel, CEDAW/C/ISR/CO/6 (17 November 2017).: The Committee's own concluding observations, retrieved as PDF from the United Nations documents system and read in full. Paragraph 28(c) lists among its concerns 'psychological violence and abuse by husbands against their wives during divorce proceedings through the withholding of consent to divorce (also known as get abuse)'. Paragraph 26 records that '(a) Discriminatory stereotypes based on restrictive religious interpretations concerning the roles and responsibilities of women and men in the family and in society persist, in particular among ultra-Orthodox Israelis' and that '(b) Married women who are unable to divorce because they have not received the get continue to suffer stigma and discrimination when they bear children by men other than their husbands'. Paragraph 8 records the maintained reservations to articles 7(b) and 16 and the State party's explanation that they 'relate to the very fabric of Israeli society, which comprises many religions, each having varying degrees of autonomy with regard to certain religious practices', together with the Committee's welcome for the 2012 amendment to the Rabbinical Courts (Enforcement of Divorce Judgments) Law.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CEDAW%2FC%2FISR%2FCO%2F6&l=en&t=pdf Corpus classification: un-treaty-body; evidentiary role: concluding-observations.
Retrieval: 2026-07-28 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-28 (CEDAW channel, G2 evenhandedness pass; UN document retrieved directly from documents.un.org, PDF magic bytes verified, converted with pdftotext and paragraphs 8, 26 and 28 checked verbatim before drafting)

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