For two years, G. believed her ex-husband. Each time, he promised he would return from the United States, sort out the paperwork, send money and make everything right. Meanwhile, in northern Israel, she was left alone with six children, leaving home at 6 a.m. and returning only in the evening, with the older children watching the younger ones so she could work and keep the household afloat. “He managed to fool me,” she says today.
Only after years of waiting, fear and despair did she discover that distance does not have to mean surrender. A legal battle across continents ended in a significant agreement and the recovery of what she and her children were owed. Behind every case like hers is a life story: a woman left in Israel with children, rent, after-school activities, bills and financial anxiety, while her ex-husband crosses an ocean and starts a new life.
Far from the spotlight, behind the doors of gray government offices, a small unit in the Legal Aid Department at the Justice Ministry is doing what many women believe is impossible: pursuing child support debtors who have crossed borders and continents, and forcing them to pay what courts have already ruled belongs to their children.
‘I knew I would get the money’
G. clearly remembers the moment she understood the promises were over, after a long period in which she clung to every promise, call and hint that he might really come back. “For two years, he kept dragging it out,” she says. “Soon he would come, soon he would finish the paperwork, and I believed him. When you have six children and you are alone, you look for any shred of hope.”
But that hope gradually faded, and reality hit hard. Her youngest was 3 when it all began; today, he is already grown. “Six children is not just money,” she says. “It is emotional too, and almost all of them were minors. I had to think every moment about how to manage, to go out to work and leave the older ones to watch the younger ones so I could support them.” She would leave the house at 6 a.m. and return only at 8 or 9 p.m. “It was hard not to see the children,” she says. “I would come home exhausted. But there was no choice.”
Before turning to legal aid, she tried everything. “I first tried to talk to him, to tell him I needed help. The answer was always that he had nothing. I was afraid to stand up to this. I had already gotten used to the fact that I had to fight. I knew my situation so well that I could no longer see myself any other way.” That fear, she says, is one reason many women do not seek help. “You get used to it and learn to survive,” she says. “Then it seems to you that there is no other way.”
Only years later did she decide to break the cycle. The process lasted more than a year, but unlike the long years of passive waiting, this time she felt someone was walking with her. “I knew I would get the money,” she says. “I knew that in the end I would get it.” When her ex-husband tried to convince her to stop the process, she no longer hesitated. “I told him: Everything that happens, everything we discuss, we discuss in front of a lawyer. I am not talking about anything. No agreements, no decisions.”
Today, after an agreement was reached with the help of attorney Ruth Mislef-Tibi of the Legal Aid Department, and G. received half of the house her ex-husband owns in Israel, she says she is glad she took action. “I suggest that every woman do it and not wait,” she says. “Do not be naive like I was and wait for years. Had I known about this then, I would have gone that same moment. There is someone who listens and helps.”
From thousands to tens of thousands of dollars
Thousands of miles away, in New Jersey, Arianna Bloom, the mother of a 23-year-old son, tells a different story, but one that sounds painfully familiar. She too searched for answers for a long time. “There were many times when I no longer believed,” she admits.
After countless attempts, calls, inquiries and searches, she accidentally discovered the possibility of acting through the international enforcement mechanism. “I found it online. I did some search, and suddenly I found it. I simply sent an email, and within hours they got back to me.” She still sounds surprised by the response she received. “They were literally a breath of fresh air. I have no words.”
The first time, they handled a debt of about $6,000 for her. “He simply contacted him, spoke to him a little, and the man paid. It was amazing. I really did not believe it,” she says. Then came the second round, this time for $76,000. “It was a lot. About 60% of everything he owed me.”
That process was more complicated. The address was hidden, the evasions continued and the road to court became tangled. But Bloom says she was not left alone. She praises Mislef-Tibi, who represented her and acted with determination. “She went after him in four different ways,” Bloom says, until she managed to locate an address through a court order.
Even today, after everything she went through, Bloom does not speak only about money. She speaks about peace of mind. “You have to do everything possible to reach a lump-sum amount,” she says. “It would prevent so much dealing with this. It comes off the table. It is over.”
He paid moments before takeoff
Mislef-Tibi, who represented both women on behalf of the Legal Aid Department, knows the complexity well. “These are cases in which it is difficult to locate the debtor, and difficult to obtain his cooperation or impose sanctions on him, because he is not in the same country as the woman and the children,” she says. “In several cases, clients told me that for years they raised the children alone, while coping with many difficulties, both financial and emotional, and did not know there was a way to act against a father who left Israel and cut off contact. The effective involvement of legal aid in such cases is critical.”
In 2023 and 2024, the Legal Aid Department collected about $2.7 million from debtors living abroad. Behind that figure are stories that sound almost impossible: a court in Ukraine that enforced an Israeli child support ruling for the first time during wartime; a policy change in Australia that allowed funds to be transferred directly to Israel; and an exit ban that led an American father to pay his full child support debt moments before his flight.
In one case, attorneys from the Tel Aviv district advanced a particularly creative legal solution in cooperation with authorities in Finland. After a Finnish court enforced an Israeli child support ruling, the debtor, who had been living in Finland, moved to Canada, which does not have a reciprocal child support collection treaty with Israel, making the debt impossible to collect directly. Instead of stopping the process, a new strategy was built around the reciprocal treaty between Finland and Canada. Finnish authorities approached Canada on the basis of the Finnish ruling, and an update from Canadian authorities is now pending. The assessment is that under the agreements between the two countries, the ruling can be implemented.
One of the prominent cases recently ended in Tel Aviv Family Court, which accepted a claim filed by a woman living in Israel and enforced a ruling handed down years earlier in New York. The father was ordered to pay the full child support amount, along with 15,000 shekels in legal expenses. In another case, which stretched over nearly two decades, a woman who immigrated to the United States dealt with child support debt that grew to about 1.2 million shekels. After the debtor entered Israel, the attorney was able to prevent him from leaving the country through an enforcement file opened against him. The case moved through several courts, and eventually ended in a settlement under which the debtor agreed to pay 560,000 shekels in child support for the child, who is now an adult.
Attorney Daniel Raz, the national supervisor for family status and child support collection from debtors abroad, says the complexity extends far beyond legal questions. “Behind every case there are often years of struggle, dealing with foreign legal systems, complex international bureaucracy and sometimes a challenging security reality as well,” he says. “Despite this, we manage to achieve significant breakthroughs and real results for many families who no longer believed they would receive what had been awarded to them.”
Beyond every legal mechanism, regulation and ruling, the story is first and foremost a human one. “I was in a life sentence,” Bloom says of the years in which she raised her son alone. Now, she is asking other women not to wait. Sometimes, even when the father is overseas, justice can still find its way home.