A state sponsored rabbinical court in Israel ruled against a woman whose husband claimed she is a witch.
A Salem Witch Trial In Modern Day Israel
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
A state sponsored rabbinical court in Israel ruled against a woman whose husband claimed she is a witch.
Yossi Gurvitz at +972 reports that the rabbinical court of Haifa reduced the value of the woman’s ketuba, wedding contract, by 90,000 NIS (about $25,000) even though there is no clear halakhic precedent to do so because the halakhic penalty for practicing witchcraft is death and, thankfully, today's rabbinic courts lack the power to administer the death penalty.
Instead, the rabbis relied on Lekutei Moharan, the book of hasidic stories and philosophy written by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in the early 19th century to extract the penalty after the woman failed a lie detector test.
But rabbis Yitzhak Shmuel Gamzo, Michael Bleicher, and Meir Kahan acquitted the woman of refusing to cook for her husband, because they found her husband had committed adultery. They reasoned that was reason enough for the woman to shirk her spousal cooking duty.
[Hat Tip: Elisheva.]