For more than 40 years, Susan Weiss has stood in the breach between synagogue and state in Israel, struggling to push them apart on behalf of women caught like “slaves” in bitter marriages and for the men and women whose civil rights have been curtailed because they are mamzerim, the offspring of certain religiously prohibited couplings.

Weiss said that over time she determined that the central issue on this front is not  individual bad actors or specific interpretations of religious laws but of the fundamental system.

“We do have a problem with bad men and bad rabbis and bad halachot, but what’s bigger than all of that is the fact that the state is compelling this system on its citizens,” Weiss told eJewishPhilanthropy in a recent interview. “So the structure of the state and the democratic institutions of the state which have to protect individual rights [is missing]. The thing became much bigger than a couple of bad apples that need to be persuaded to divorce their wives,” she said. 

Now, as she retires next month from the Center for Women’s Justice, the organization she founded two decades ago, Weiss, 71, is looking back on the victories she has won, and the work still to be done to protect women.

“I don’t have to finish the work. I started the work,” she said on a cold winter afternoon sitting in her Jerusalem living room, where a volume by Saul Bellow shared space on the coffee table with a copy of Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss and a Green Hulk comic book.

After unsuccessfully seeking alternative configurations for CWJ to continue, Weiss decided that, having already entered her eighth decade, it was finally time to step down and close the organization. 

Secular women’s groups were uninterested in challenging the religious status quo, while other religious organizations hesitated to adopt CWJ’s more combative stance against the authority of the state rabbinate, she said. And no one was particularly interested in tackling the particularly thorny issue of mamzerim, who according to Jewish law are born out of certain forbidden relationships, such as incest or an act of adultery by a married Jewish woman, and can only marry other mamzerim. These mamzerim, as well as some people who are merely suspected of falling into that category, have in the past been tracked on a state marriage blacklist and denied certain civil rights, on the grounds that preventing further mamzerim is a top priority for religious authorities.

As she helps prepare the path for the closing of CWJ, Weiss has already taken a step back in terms of her legal work. She continues to work there on a volunteer basis and hosts the “Justice Unbound” podcast with Rivkah Lubitch, a CWJ board member and veteran rabbinic pleader (a sort-of lawyer for rabbinic courts). Weiss is also writing articles for online publications Jofa and Nashim Journal and just recently gave a lecture at the Hartman Institute. 

Weiss — described by CWJ employees as their “visionary leader” — told eJP that she knows the work she set out to do with the founding of CWJ is not finished, and the fight continues. But she is OK with that.

The important thing now is to make sure all the knowledge, information and legal precedents they have amassed at CWJ over the past 20 years are preserved and archived so that others may be able to refer back to them and use them to help move forward in the continuing struggle, Weiss told eJP. In preparation, CWJ began archiving its materials with the Haifa Feminist Institute and the Van Leer Institute’s Yodaat Center, updated its website as a resource for future use and outsourced the mamzerim issue and pending Supreme Court cases to attorneys capable of handling them, while coordinating with other organizations and legal teams to continue its work.

After making aliyah from New York in 1980, Weiss began as a divorce lawyer in Israel, encountering the challenges of religious and civil law entanglements that can create inequality for women in marriage and divorce. She later became a rabbinical pleader, a teacher of rabbinical judges and founded Yad L’isha to support mesuravot get — women denied a Jewish divorce, also known as agunot — who are often forced to pay exorbitant sums to obtain a get. 

“One of my very first cases I was in court and the attorney or rabbinic pleader on the other side started talking in Yiddish to the rabbis. And I realized that I was in an old boys club and that things weren’t being conducted like regular courts of law,” she said.

Eventually wanting to make a more significant legal impact and take on the system more directly, Weiss founded CWJ in 2004, working at the intersection of religion, democracy and women’s rights, to entrench social change through innovative legal tools, such as pioneering the strategy of using the legal concept of a tort — a civil wrong that has caused harm or loss to the plaintiff — for get refusals, aggressively going after recalcitrant husbands with civil suits for the damage they were causing to their wives.

According to CWJ, it has established more than 20 groundbreaking legal precedents in get refusal cases and civil courts have awarded more than NIS 6 million ($1.7 million) in damage awards to CWJ clients whose husbands have refused to grant them gets. In addition, 65% of their clients — who are all long-term victims of get recalcitrance — have received their get within 18 to 24 months of initiating legal proceedings. It successfully fought two cases several years ago in civil court where women from the former Soviet Union had their conversions repealed during rabbinical court divorce proceedings, and they and their children were deemed no longer to be Jewish. There have not been any attempts by the rabbinate to repeal conversions since then, Weiss said.

There can’t be a true democracy without true equality for all — including for women in matters of marriage and divorce, she said. In Israel, because of the lack of separation between religion and state, that is not possible, she said. Weiss noted that even as civil marriages have become more popular in Israel through various legal workarounds, anyone who is recognized as legally married by the state, even if it is not a religious marriage, is still required to obtain a get through the rabbinate. 

“I’m happy for people who think that they can make a better rabbinate. I think it’s important for them to continue trying to do that. But I would prefer for someone to say that the king is naked,” she said. 

While her first client of 31 years ago still has not been granted a get by her recalcitrant husband, now in her 80s, the woman has restarted the process to receive a get, and her husband has been sitting in jail for four years because of his refusal and was forced by the civil courts to sell her his half of their shared apartment, and that in itself is an achievement said Weiss.

She acknowledged uncertainty about the future of advancing religious freedom under the current right-wing government and its religious coalition partners, but was skeptical that the situation would go backwards in a significant way. 

“I think the cat is out of the bag and the common sense is that [get refusal] is no longer acceptable. We can’t necessarily change the system; some of these problems cannot be fixed from within, but we have to challenge it and disentangle ourselves eventually,” she said. “We may not see the change in our lifetime that… I would at least ideally like, but… [we’re not going to] go back to having slaves, women can’t go back inside the kitchen.”

Indeed she said, recent statistics show that even within the Orthodox community the numbers of couples who choose to get married halachically but outside of the Israeli chief rabbinate system has reportedly “skyrocketed.” There has also been an increase in interest in prenuptial agreements, of which CWJ is one of the pioneers, which allow couples to circumvent the rabbinate stipulating halichally valid consequences for get refusal, she said.

The prenup also deals with cases of the husband’s absence or inability to give a get, which Weiss said sadly becomes more crucial during wartime. In addition, they are working on the adoption of a new prenuptial provision that avoids halitza, a process in rabbinical Judaism by which a childless widow and the brother of her deceased husband can avoid the duty to marry. “Basically we really have set the stage in many ways. We put these problems on the map, we have put them in front of the Supreme Court. I am very proud of that. Even though there’s lots of things I would have liked the Supreme Court to do, and they didn’t do it,” said Weiss. “But we put these [issues] on the map, the fact that it’s not a religious right not to give a get, but it is a civil wrong. So we did all those things. I’m very, very, very proud of it.”