A Rare Biblical Ceremony Draws New Attention In Israel

Anat Amosi Harpazi adored her life developing thefarm in the Galilee she and her young husband had recently purchased. Nearly forty years later, she shows me a sepia-toned photo of herself on her wedding day grinning at the camera alongside a tall, solid man with a moustache and oversized glasses.

Though the couple needed to take out loans to start their farm, Anat recalls their life as blissful. “One Shabbat, [my husband’s] brother was with us…He said, ‘This is what I want my married life to be’.”

But just two days after that Shabbat in 1987, Anat’s husband died in an equipment accident on the farm. “In one moment, I lost everything.”

Unfortunately, this tragedy was just the beginning for Anat. She would spend the next three years fighting off financial claims from her in-laws which they demanded be met in exchange for their performance of the Halitza ceremony, culminating in the humiliating experience of the ceremony itself. “All of a sudden I understand that they’re against me and they’re raising a war,” she says now.

The Halitza ceremony, to release Jewish widows of childless men—required by the State of Israel of all such widows of childless men as a condition of remarriage—has flown largely under the public radar, even though it can be a humiliating experience and can open the door for financial extortion of the widow.

However, after October 7, when reserves were called up, and it was clear that many young men could die in battle, the ceremony was ripe for a public and institutional reckoning.

These men would likely leave behind widows, who would need to have Halitza performed by their in-laws in order to remarry. And it became clear that Rabbinical Court leaders have improved their handling of the ceremony, while women’s rights advocates are lobbying for further reform, some publicly and some quietly behind the scenes.

WHAT IS HALITZA?

The Halitza ceremony is little known, even among religious Jews. It’s ancient: in the event that a married man dies childless but has a living brother, Halitza is a Biblical-law-based ceremony that allows his wife to remarry, releasing her from the obligation to marry his brother. Intended to protect childless widows in tribal times, the law presents a hurdle for them today: Without this ceremony, Israeli widows cannot remarry, because Jewish marital law is legally binding for Jews in Israel.

The ceremony is odd. Picture this: The widow and her deceased husband’s brother enter a room in the Rabbinical Court where ten male Rabbis are present. The deceased’s brother ties on an ancient-looking leather sandal. The widow crouches at his feet, unties the sandal, and spits on the ground before him, reciting the Biblical phrase: “Thus shall be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house!” alluding to the fact that the two are not marrying each other, as the Bible prefers they should.

One reason it has flown under the radar? It’s relatively rare, only required when a man dies childless and has a living brother. Halitza ceremonies are performed around 15 to 20 times per year across Israel, according to the annual reports from the Rabbinical Court. However, this number does not account for unresolved cases—due to religious ineligibility of the brother, noncompliance or financial disputes. In such cases, women are indefinitely unable to legally remarry.

At the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, women’s rights organizations raised the alarm that Halitza cases would increase as young soldiers died in battle. And indeed, deaths from battle did result in a need for Halitza, although fewer than originally feared. The Rabbinate’s public records show 13 cases of Halitza may be related to deaths during the war, although this figure is likely incomplete as widows can wait or choose never to undergo the ceremony. One expert estimates that there are approximately 30 war widows who would need Halitza in order to remarry; as well as widows whose spouses died in other circumstances (2025 has already had eight non war-related cases).

WHAT WOMEN SAY

While every widow’s experience with Halitza is unique, women who’ve undergone the ceremony mention shared elements— ones I heard about in firsthand interviews throughout 2024.

Many describe the experience as humiliating. Anat recalls that “After I washed [my brother-in-law’s] foot, I needed to crouch and untie the sandal, grab it in my hand, and spit on the floor… At the time I was doing hormonal treatments that caused me to have hot flashes every twenty minutes. And my mouth was dry and there was no saliva.

The process was long: “Five hours—five hours!—I tried to spit,” she says. “Ten rabbis on their knees with magnifying glasses looking at the drops and deciding if they’re spit or sweat. Because of the hot flashes I was in puddles of sweat.

They decided, under the magnifying glass, that one of the drops was spit, and then I threw the sandal in the direction of the door. They said ‘You are now permitted to any man.’ It was a nightmare.”

Rachel (not her real name) shared “My husband was killed in 2002, in Operation Protective Shield, in battle in Jenin. I was 24 at the time. Because the ceremony is exotic, they emptied all the [Rabbinical Court] halls of all the judges so everyone came to watch the ceremony… The room was full of bearded Haredi men, and I’m standing there… They said to me ‘Light a candle because it gives rest to the soul of the deceased.’ … I felt like a monkey in a zoo.”

At the same time, some women report the ceremony to be helpful in their grieving process. Yael Citroen Tokayer had been married for three months when her young husband was killed in a car accident on his way to university in 2015. “Everyone [at the Rabbinate] was very, very nice and kind and respectful and understanding of the situation,” she says. The ceremony facilitated a unique element of Yael’s grieving process: closure.

Though it may facilitate healing for some participants, there is a persistent and fundamental power imbalance between the widow and the deceased’s family. If the family refuses to perform the ceremony for the widow, or only agree to do so under certain financial conditions, the widow is stuck. She is unable to remarry until the family performs the ceremony.

Head Judge Rabbi Avraham Meisels of the Rabbinical Court in Netanya recently adjudicated a case of blatant financial extortion of a widow in Petach Tikvah. “I had a case where [the husband’s family] demanded a lot of money, so I said I will send him to jail…”

Sometimes families might believe themselves justified in withholding Halitza in exchange for money. Rabbinical Advocate Rivka Lubitz of the Center for Women’s Justice, a legal advocacy organization that promotes women’s rights under Israeli religious law, explains that “we’re usually talking about young couples who don’t have children. So if the parents of the husband give a big sum of money towards an apartment for the young couple to live in together and raise a family, the family would say to themselves “There’s no children involved, she’ll get remarried … then some other family will give her money towards an apartment, why shouldn’t she give us back the money?…It’s not right to hold back Halitza for that.”

And financial extortion of the widow can take less obvious forms, such as in Anat’s case, and can drag on for years. Anat recalls that “After a year I received a letter from my in-laws asking me to pay back the money that I owed them,” she says. “I had never taken anything from them—no financial help, nothing… Every meeting in the Rabbinical Courts, the judges would say to me ‘finish the property issues and then you’ll get Halitza.’ When I told them that I don’t have money to give, they said ‘That’s not our issue.’”

IMPROVEMENT & CALLS FOR REFORM

Increased recognition of the ceremony’s impact on widows like Anat has led to attempts to make Halitza as comfortable and smooth as possible, particularly during the past year and a half of war.

Rabbinical Advocate Moriya Dayan of Yad La’Isha, a legal advocacy organization that assists women in Rabbinical Court proceedings, says that “[at the beginning of the war] we contacted [Former Chief ] Rabbi Lau and asked to make a framework that would make things easier for the widows and make the ceremony less unpleasant. Rabbi Lau was very, very open and sensitive and said he would make a track that bypasses the bureaucracy and allows the women to do the ceremony in the most comfortable and non-offensive way possible.” Head Judge Meisels says that he treats the widows with the utmost respect.

The Chief Rabbi’s personal oversight of Halitza during the war is likely also curbing financial extortion. Yet one woman who witnessed the Halitza of her son’s widow believes that if leading rabbis wanted to eliminate the practice of Halitza entirely, “they would find a Jewish legal way to do so. Just like we don’t implement ‘an eye for an eye,’ even though it is written in the Torah,” she adds. “[Halitza] doesn’t limit men, and the world of rabbinic decisors are men.”

Alexandra Zak, a former Dorot Fellow, has experience in Israeli religion-and-state issues and now coordinates projects at a solar energy company in Jerusalem.