Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State

Susan Weiss, PhD is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Justice (CWJ). Susan has been actively working to find solutions for the problems of Jewish women and divorce for over 20 years, first as a private attorney, then as the founder and director of Yad L’Isha from 1997-2004, and now as the founder and executive director of CWJ. Susan initiated the innovative tactic of securing compensatory damage awards for women whose husbands withheld a get by filing damage cases in Israeli civil courts, a tactic noted as “game-changing” by the prestigious Ha’aretz news daily. A 2013 profile in Tablet Magazine recognizes Susan as “one woman [who] has changed the playing field,” significantly advancing the cause of women in Israel. She is also an editor of The Law and its Decisor (a quarterly journal published by Bar Ilan University Law School) and has written extensively about Jewish women and divorce. Susan is a published author with her new book, Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State: Israel’s Civil War, which she coauthored with Netty C. Gross-Horowitz, launched in December 2012.

In recognition of her essential work, Susan has been honored with a number of awards including the Haiti Jewish Refugee Legacy Project Tikkun Olam Award (2016), Jewel Bellush Israeli Feminist Award (2013), Israel Bar Association Women in Law Award (2009), and La’Isha magazine’s “Alternative Torch-Bearer” Award (2007). These credentials have positioned Susan as a sought-after speaker and lecturer. Some recent speaking engagements included the AJC leadership colloquium on the role of the rabbinate in public life as a factor affecting Israel-American Jewish relations in NY, a JOFA event entitled “Separate but Equal? The Status of Women in Israel and the American Jewish Community” on gender-related events in Israel and their implications for American Jewry and an HBI International Workshop on New Understandings of Gender, Love, and the Jewish Family. Susan holds an MA and a PhD in sociology and anthropology from Tel Aviv University, and a JD from Brooklyn Law School.

Netty Gross-Horowitz, an acclaimed reporter and writer who penned scores of in-depth features about the Jewish world, including groundbreaking investigations for The Jerusalem Report into restitution for Holocaust victims, died on November 15 in New York City. She was 66. With her stylish flair, Gross-Horowitz brought a sophisticated, Upper West Side chic to Jerusalem, where she lived for nearly three decades before moving back to her native New York in the course of a lengthy battle with multiple system atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder. She is survived by her siblings Michele Bankhalter and Kenneth (Kenny) Cappell, her children Ayala Horwitz, Tamar Freidenberg, Avi Gross and Daniel (Dani) Gross, and eight grandchildren. Her husband, Elliott Horowitz, died in 2017. Gross-Horowitz worked most extensively for The Jerusalem Report, and wrote for other publications including The Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel during a career that spanned decades.