Thread by @RStomel

Wow. This one checks all the boxes:
☑ rejecting grounds that might free an agunah
☑ finding creative ways to declare a convicted pedophile kosher
☑ prioritizing their own monopoly over actual lives
☑ rejecting grounds to clear a baby's mamzer status
ynet.co.il/articles/0,734…

It is mind boggling to me that they go to such extreme, creative lengths to find a way to declare the convicted pedophile "not a rasha" and therefore a kosher wedding witness in order to keep this longtime-agunah's marriage intact and to make sure her child is a mamzer. Wow.

We always say that in cases of mamzerim and agunot, a beit din will do everything in its power and stretch as far as they can to clear the mamzer status and free the agunah. Here, their efforts went in the opposite direction:

When presented with a flaw in the agunah's marriage ceremony--one witness was a convicted pedophile & therefore a "rasha" unfit to bear witness--instead of seizing the opportunity to annul the marriage, the beit din made all sorts of creative arguments why he was actually kosher:

They argued the sexual abuse wasn't so bad since he didn't directly touch the child's genitals; he felt bad about it on Yom Kippur, so that absolved him of his sins; he says a prayer every night asking forgiveness from anyone he might have harmed, so that counts as repentance;

his plea bargain included paying his victim NIS 50,000, meaning he had made things right with his victim; though he confessed to the abuse, halacha doesn't accept self-incriminating testimony; he doesn't have a reputation as a pedophile, so it must have been a one-time "slip up";

what he did with the child didn't count as gay sex, because hands touching genitals isn't full-on "mishkav zachar" (note how they are suddenly willing to find halachic ways to tolerate sexual acts between males, yet would never do the same for a consensual adult gay relationship)

SO MANY ARGUMENTS TO DECLARE A PEDOPHILE KOSHER.
So much halachic creativity. Such dedication and ingenuity. Such an ambitious triumph of rabbinic rationalizing.
All for the sake of making sure an agunah never goes free. And to make sure her baby stays a mamzer. Shkoyach.

Though, to their defense, the BD isn't doing this out of malice toward the woman & baby; they're just collateral damage.
Their real target here is the private Beit Din, headed by R Sperber, who freed her. What's a woman's freedom when the state's monopoly on religion is at stake?

Recall that just a month ago, the BD pulled out their biggest, most creative guns yet in order to punish another longtime agunah who had been freed by R Sperber's private Orthodox court:

https://twitter.com/cwjisrael/status/1123325131370246145

Imagine if all of this motivation, urgency, halachic prowess & power were applied to finding solutions to free the woman and child in this story.
Imagine how much good they could do if they utilized a fraction of this energy to wield Torah as a tool of justice instead of a weapon

Imagine if the women who stepped into their courts were valued as full humans deserving of freedom and dignity instead of as pawns in a larger political game of religion & state

I am livid.
On behalf of women, on behalf of children, on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, on behalf of Torah, on behalf of democracy, on behalf of every Israeli in this country who is suffocating under the Rabbinate's chokehold on our lives and liberty.

Enough.

Postscript:
Remember about a year ago, when the state's BD finally freed the agunah of infamous get-refuser, Oded Guez, via annulment?

https://twitter.com/RStomel/status/1008747462931243009

The grounds that they cited for annulling the marriage was because one of the witnesses was lax on shomer negiya (religious guidelines of not touching the opposite sex). This was enough to declare him "פרוץ בעריות"--violating sexual boundaries--and therefore an invalid witness

The same institution, though, classified child molestation--for which the convicted offender served 3.5 years of jail time--as a "small slip-up" and not nearly as egregious a crime as being lax on shomer negiyah.

It's more than just a twisted version of Blu Greenberg's famous dictum, "Where there's a rabbinic will, there's a halachic way," criticizing the rabbinic institutions' unwillingness to take action.
Here, they DID take action. The problem is the priorities guiding those actions

and that they are not even following their own rules. The accept that sexual impropriety (however they define it) is grounds for disqualifying a witness and therefore annulment. Any claim of "we wish we could help her, but our hands are halachically tied" is a bad faith dupery