Israel Father's Rights Advocacy Council fights for the equal parenting status of divorced Jewish fathers and paternal families.
Israel Father’s Rights Advocacy Council (IFRAC) is the premier advocacy and representative organization for divorced Jewish fathers and paternal families in the world. IFRAC represents parents, grandparents and children affected by divorce within Israel and throughout the Diaspora. It currently represents over 8,000 divorced fathers in Israel alone and numbers are growing both inside and outside Israel.
As it stands, Israeli family law is skewed against the father in favour of the mother. Custody is automatically awarded to the mother until the child is six years of age unless she can be shown to be violent, a drug abuser or extremely negligent. This constitutes active discrimination on the basis of gender.
A child’s alienation from their parents is not in the best interests of the child, as demonstrated by the legally and medically recognized Parental Alienation Syndrome. This is a term that describes the effects of systematic denigration by one parent against the other.
IFRAC serves as the primary legislative and social welfare advocacy organization for divorced fathers and families, serving as a liaison and lobbyist in the Knesset, Congress, Parliament, Beth Dins and appropriate social welfare ministries as well as to appropriate Federations of Jewish Family Service organizations.
Accomplishments
1.
IFRAC organizes demonstrations demanding equal parenting status for custody agreements. IFRAC holds conferences in both the US and Israel, targeting benefactors and those in need. Conferences bring together legal experts, social workers with expertise in assisting fathers, and father’s rights experts. Robin Hood Israel Foundation and Divorced Jewish Fathers at Goldman Sachs support the conferences.
2.
IFRAC provides specific legal aid and social service solutions where voids may exist in Israel, the US, and the Diaspora. This includes escorted flights, post-divorce reconciliation, legal aid services, friend of court filings, and class action motions. It also maintains a series of facilities for paternal visitation in Israel in communities where they do not exist.
3.
One recent initiative of IFRAC has been to call for an end to the imposition of 100% liens on father’s incomes for years at a time, aptly described by one District Court Judge Shlomo Elbaz as a “benign incarceration at the financial expense of their family and the American Embassy.”