One year after determining that eight Jews who tried to escape from Iran in 1994 were murdered on their way to Israel, the Mossad has recently found that three other Jews who left Iran three years later were also murdered, Ynet reported. The new determination enabled the Rabbinical Court to rule that their wives are released from their Agunah status and may remarry.
Agunah (Heb: anchored) is a halachic term for a Jewish woman who may not be married because her husband refuses to divorce her, or is missing.
The brothers Cyrus and Ibrahim Kahrameni and Norallah Ravizada fled Tehran in February 1997. They were to meet with a smuggler at the Pakistani border, but did not arrive at the meeting and have since disappeared. Three years earlier, eight other Jews who left Iran in an attempt to flee to Israel disappeared. Their families, who came to Israel via Turkey, have been complaining over the years that the state is not doing enough to find their loved ones and provide closure to the painful affair.
A few years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Mossad to expand the investigation of the fate of the missing. Mossad chief Tamir Pardo took on the assignment and managed to close the case. In March last year it was reported that the Mossad was able to unravel what happened to the eight Jews who fled in 1994, stating that “intelligence officials received information from a reliable source that those Jews were captured during the escape and were killed.”
Recently the Mossad also informed the families of three other missing that their loved ones were also caught and killed during their escape.
Using this new information, a panel of the Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, headed by Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, removed the status of Agunot from the wives of the missing, stating that they are the widows of martyrs. The families are now waiting for the official judgment to be released and until then they have declined to comment.
The families requested a meeting with the President and the Prime Minister so that they will officially deliver to them the news.
