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41 o n e The Clueless Agunah Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination Shackled hand and foot, Eitan was escorted into the Jerusalem Rabbinic Court by two wiry police officers. “Our second today,” one of the cops told Rivkah, the reserved but resolute rabbinic pleader who had orchestrated this much longedfor moment for her client, Shira, Eitan’s wife. “This is my regular beat. Me and my partner, we bring in about five of these sonofabitches every week, to the Beit Din. Go figure them out. I prefer thieves. These husbands, they make me sick.” Eitan was an unkempt, middle-aged man with little hair. He weighed at least 150 kilo, about 330 pounds, in a not-very-tall frame, and the heavy chains on his legs chafed against his swollen ankles, annoying him. He hadn’t always been so big. When he married Shira, he weighed barely 100 kilo. Pleasantly pudgy at that time, one might have said, if one wanted to be kind. Like a teddy bear. At least that’s what Shira thought then. Beginnings In 1987 Shira Mazal Yosef, of medium height, with darkish skin tone, married Eitan Avimelch Azulai, her first and only boyfriend, when she was only twenty. They had known each other since she was a freshman and he a senior at their high school, located in the heart of Maoz Zion, a small locality on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where they lived. After a mutual friend introduced them M a r r i a g e a n d D i v o r c e i n t h e J e w i s h S tat e 42 at the water fountain, it took what seemed an eternity, says Shira, before Eitan finally stammered that he liked her sweater. A perky, pumped-up sort herself, she smiled bashfully and took his long silences for braininess. “He’s too smart for small talk,” she confidently told her mother when the latter commented on his awkward manner. Their first date was at a local movie theater. On a sticky summer night, he held her hand in the darkened theater. Shira liked the silent type, and Eitan’s easy pace was fine with her. To be honest, she hadn’t had much experience with boys herself. After the movie, he bought ice cream cones. As they licked their cones and spoke of the future — he said he wanted five kids — it all seemed so romantic and idyllic. Though from a secular family, when she married Eitan, Shira was a virgin — bitultilah, as it is written in Aramaic in the ketubah. It was different then, in the eighties. Though virgin brides are a rare if not extinct phenomenon today, even among those who might claim to be Orthodox, back then brides whose families hailed from conservative Muslim countries were still bitultalot . Both Shira’s and Eitan’s family rode on the Sabbath and ate pretty much what they wanted outside their homes, but they prided themselves on their conservative ways and respect for traditional customs. But an outsider would never have guessed that Shira was a traditional sort after a glimpse of her wedding gown. She and her mother loved the dress, sewn by a local seamstress, who copied it from a bridal magazine and added all imaginable embellishments. It was strapless and backless — not what they wore in Tripoli or Fez, where the groom’s and bride’s families came from. The only nod to the past was Shira’s thick antique veil, which her maternal grandmother, Mazal-Tov, had worn on her wedding day. A sensible girl with a brown ponytail who normally dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, Shira had dreamed for years of renting a gauzy number straight from the ateliers of famous Israeli wedding-wear designers such as Galit Levi or Pnina Tornai in North Tel Aviv. But the dresses she sampled at those upscale establishments were too costly. Her father worked as a clerk for the city’s collection department, running after people who didn’t pay their parking tickets, and her mother was a secretary. Renting a fancy gown was beyond their means, costing the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, compared with the few hundred dollars that a local seamstress requested. All of Shira’s ideas for the wedding came from Mitchatnim (Marrying), a quarterly magazine published by the Israeli equivalent...

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