Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate which governs matters of personal status according to halacha, religious law, permits bigamous marriages in certain circumstances. Dr. Zerach Warhaftig, the Minister for Religious Affairs, told the Knesset last night that since the establishment of the State in 1948 the rabbinate has granted 802 Jews the right to take a second wife though they were neither divorced nor widowed.
Israeli criminal law defers to religious law in this matter. It states that a man shall not be prosecuted for bigamy if his bigamous marriage was entered with the approval of a three-man rabbinical tribunal legally constituted.
Warhaftig said in reply to questions that 24 such marriages were authorized by rabbinical tribunals last year alone. Permission to take a second wife has been granted in cases where the man’s first spouse is an incurable lunatic incapable of signing divorce papers; where she refused to cohabit with her husband or in cases where the wife could not conceive and would not accept a divorce.
(In New York, Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, spiritual leader of the Orthodox Fifth Avenue Synagogue, explained that at about the year 1000 C.E., Rabbi Gershom Ben Judah established a prohibition against polygamy for Ashkenazi Jews. That prohibition provided for special rabbinical sanctions for polygamy under extenuating circumstances.
Rabbi Rackman added that Israel extended Rabbi Gershom’s prohibition to include Sephardic (Oriental) Jews, except in cases where they came to Israel with more than one wife in accordance with their previous social customs. Israeli rabbinical tribunals have authorized special polygamous relationships for both Sephardim and Ashkenazim.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
