Posted on 12/01/21
| News Source: Vosizneias.com
At least one get refuser succeeded in leaving Israel in the past few days as a result of an oversight by the rabbinical courts.
In the last few days the courts had suffered from a computer glitch which meant that injunctions preventing get refusers from leaving the country were not being processed. This allowed the refusers to leave the country without anyone stopping them at passport control, as would be required by law.
The rabbinical judges (dayanim) were only informed on Tuesday of the glitch and sent a hand-written list of all the get refusers to passport control.
The issue was noticed by the registrar of the Petah Tikva rabbinical court nearly a week ago but despite this the director of the rabbinical courts did not update the dayanim and they in turn did not update passport control about the matter.
The director of the Aguna department warned already on Monday that a get refuser had left the country and asked the courts to submit new guidelines but nothing was done in the meantime. Kikar Hashabat reports that more than 30 injunctions preventing people leaving the country were not processed in the system during this period.
One rabbinical judge described the matter as an “unfathomable disgrace.”
The director of the courts responded, stating that “the facts as stated in the article are incorrect. The glitch actually occurred at the passport control and all the injunctions were issued manually in the meantime. The director protests the biased announcements and wonders about the true motives of those who provided defamatory information.”