Wednesday, a state rabbinic court dissolved a woman’s marriage on the grounds of mekah ta’ut - fraud. If she had known about her husband's history of mental illness, she likely would not have married him in the first place.
Rare Divorce Ruling Frees Woman Trapped In Jewish Marriage
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
In 2011, Miriam Katz filed for divorce after after finding out that her husband had a history of mental illness that hid from her before they were married.
Sometime after she filed for divorce, her husband tried to kill himself by hanging. He was saved, but has remained hospitalized in a vegetative state ever since.
Ha’aretz reported that Wednesday, a state rabbinic court headed by rabbinic judge Rabbi Maimon Nahari dissolved the woman’s marriage on the grounds of mekah ta’ut - fraud. Her husband had deceived her by hiding his mental illness history from her and, if she had known about his history of mental illness before the wedding, she likely would not have married him.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (b.1895, d.1986) and several other rabbis outside of Israel’s haredi community have reportedly ruled that mekah ta’ut can be used to dissolve a marriage where fundamental details about a groom – a history of mental illness, for example – were hidden from the bride.
Even so, in Israel mekah ta’ut has reportedly only been used twice in the past ten years to dissolve a marriage – even though many potential cases where it could have been used presumably exist.