JERUSALEM (July 5) - The New Family
organization has asked police to investigate whether several Israeli
companies providing mail-order brides from the Ukraine are operating
legally.
The organization questions whether
the companies allow the women to retain their passports and maintain
their freedom, or turn them into virtual slaves wholly dependent on the
men who "ordered" them.
New Family chairwoman Irit Rosenblum
filed the complaint yesterday after Ma'ariv published a story about
several companies providing Israeli men with "young, pretty,
domestic" wives from the Ukraine for approximately
$4,500. According to the article, the men select a wife from the
agencies' photo albums and fly to the Ukraine to meet and marry them,
and then bring them back to Israel. If they are not satisfied with the
women when they meet them, the agency offers them others.
The mail-order bride business is an
international phenomenon, according to Rosenblum. She began looking into
it about six months ago after seeing a Web site advertisement. She
explained that while New Family usually advocates for Israeli residents
who cannot marry legally here, the organization also wants to ensure
that the women are not held prisoner through marriage.
The mail-order bride business is new
in Israel, and there are probably several dozen such brides here.
Between 100,000 and 150,000 women a
year are sold as mail-order brides, Rosenblum said, adding that the
industry generates $17 billion a year. According to statistics compiled
in the US, only 10 percent of these marriages work out; in some, the
women become prisoners.
Most of the women are from the
Philippines and Ukraine, and enter the marriages willingly, seeing
matrimony as a ticket out of poverty, Rosenblum explained. But they
often don't realize the problems they can face, and are often powerless
to fight them.
"The test is whether the women
can leave the marriage [if she is unhappy]," she said, adding that
the phenomenon raises complex moral and legal issues.
"The police and the Interior
Ministry have an obligation to investigate what is happening [before the
phenomenon increases here], and if it becomes clear that the women are
being abused and imprisoned, it must be stopped," she said.
While the agencies are partly a
matchmaking service, they exploit the fact that the women are
impoverished, said Ronit Lev-Ari, who is awaiting the cabinet's approval
to take on the chairwomanship of the Prime Minister's Office's Authority
for the Advancement of Women.
When the women arrive in Israel they
find themselves financially, socially, and legally dependent on their
new husbands - a situation that is hardly a good start for a marriage,
she said.
She noted that the man quoted in the
Ma'ariv article made it clear that he wanted a wife who would care for
and cater to him in a way that is not exactly suitable to modern Israeli
society. While the women may initially agree to this, Lev-Ari wondered
whether they feel differently once they become acclimated to Israeli
society.
"Israeli
women have demands that border on hutzpa. Feminism has gone too far here
and I don't want to battle with it," Ofer Elkabetz is quoted as
saying. Elkabetz, 44, of Sderot, married a Ukrainian woman provided by
an agency in April.