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Disgraced rabbi Mordechai “Moti” Elon will give up his rabbinic certification after a panel of High Court justices recommended he do so.
A petition to the High Court to force the convicted child sex offender to do so had been filed by three organizations: Kol v’Oz, The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel and Jewish Community Watch.
Rabbi Mordechai ‘Moti’ Elon seen in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court prior to his sentence hearing, on December 18, 2013. (David Vaaknin/Flash 90)
Last April, the Rabbinate disciplinary committee, which had threatened to strip Elon of his title, decided that he could keep it after he committed to not serve as a rabbi in any community role for a period of 10 years from the date of his conviction.
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Tell us something about yourself.
I’m a social worker and I deal mostly with violent abuse of women, and women in prostitution. I’m a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University, and I also define myself as a feminist and an activist who’s trying to help women who have been convicted of putting their abusive spouses to death.
You say “putting to death” rather than “murdering.”
Yes, and I use that phrase intentionally.
We’ll talk about that. How did you get to this group of women?
For my master’s thesis, I wanted to deal with violence against women. I discovered that there are hardly any studies about women who were been convicted of putting their partners to death. I approached the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Police, the Central Bureau of Statistics, but couldn’t get even the most basic information from them: how many women fit into that group in Israel. I started conducting my own study. I plowed through archives and databases, and learned that sin
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The police statistics, which were released following a Freedom of Information request filed by lawyer Eyal Besserglick, show there was a substantial increase in domestic violence complaints following the first lockdown in March 2020. The force expects the number of indictments to remain high in the first half of this year, as more are filed in cases of violence from last year.
“The increase in complaints and indictments is a direct result of the lockdowns, the fact that families were required to remain at home,” a police source said. “Spending many hours together heightens day-to-day frictions and sometimes exacerbates conflicts that preceded the pandemic.”