Ahead of the Tu B'Av (the "Jewish Day of Love" celebrated on the 15th day of Av), several prominent national-religious rabbis issued a stern rebuke of prenuptial agreements, saying such an arrangement only undermines marriage and could lead to its unraveling.
The warning was issued in response to the position taken by Tzohar Rabbinical Organization – which encourages more modern approaches to Jewish traditions.
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Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu said that "when one reads these prenuptial agreements, one understands that they push a couple to divorce. It's true that there are cases when a man refuses to grant his wife a divorce, but these are isolated incidents. We are in favor of the ketubah [religious marriage contract] that has been used for thousands of years and successfully so, not in favor of modern contracts that no one knows what they could lead to."
Rabbi Eliezer Igra, a judge on the Supreme Rabbinical Court in Israel, also spoke out against prenups.
This subject "holds a much more central place in public discourse than it should," he said in a recording obtained by Israel Hayom.
"About 33,000 couples get married every year, and about a third, 11,000 get divorced. Only in very few cases does the husband withhold a get [religious divorce document] from his wife. The media makes it seem that many women do not receive a get."
In response, the Yad La'isha organization, which advocates on behalf of women whose husbands refuse to grant them divorce papers, said that "the purpose of the agreements is to prevent a situation in which one spouse will hold the other one captive in a marriage that has clearly died."
The organization added that it is "not about encouraging divorce, but about saving families who have become entangled in divorce proceedings," explaining that it was "all too common that gets are used to abuse the spouse by cynically exploiting Jewish law."
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