H., a single mother in the Sharon area who immigrated to Israel from the U.K., has not been allowed to take her seven-year-old daughter abroad since she divorced her husband in 2001. This means the young girl has been unable to visit her extended family outside Israel for the past five years.

A stay of exit order was issued on the request of H.'s ex-husband to prohibit their daughter from leaving the country, ostensibly to prevent H. from abducting her. The only way around it is for H. to provide a bank guarantee of NIS 500,000, a sum she says that as a single mother she could never afford.

"They say that I am going to kidnap her," H. said recently, sighing. "I feel locked up here and I want to be able to travel with my daughter. She hasn't been able to visit my family since the divorce. My father had a difficult heart surgery recently and we weren't sure he was going to make it. I wanted my father to be able to see her, but she still wasn't allowed to leave. I have no intention of leaving or of kidnapping my daughter," continued H., who under her lawyer's advice asked not to be identified. "The court doesn't understand how important it is for immigrant single mothers to be able to travel with their children."

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H. is not alone. She recently became active, together with a significant number of other immigrant women in her situation, in Hatikvah Foundation. The organization aims to support immigrant women in Israel who, upon separation or divorce, want to retain full mobility for themselves and their children. The group was formed in July. Its website, www.hatikvah.eu, was put up last month.

"Child mobility is a social issue in a country with many cross-national marriages and, regrettably, many cross-national divorces," Rachel Levy, a Dutch journalist who founded the organization when a relative living in Israel faced the issue, says. "This needs to be talked about and dealt with. These are immigrant women who live here, marry Israeli men and settle here. Their marriage breaks down, they go through a divorce, and their children are locked up. At first, they don't know what's happening, they don't know where to turn to and they discover that they have very little way of getting out of the situation. But none of these women have even thought about abducting a child," she said.

Flooded with responses

After Levy began to research the issue for a book on Israeli civil society, she was "flooded with responses by desperate women." Within a few weeks, she says, over 100 immigrant women contacted her. She says that immigrant men dealing with child mobility issues are also welcome to join the organization, but that from their experience, the issue affects more women than men.

According to Levy, American research suggests that 96 percent of cross-national divorcees have no intention of abducting a child. Israel's policy is therefore "Draconian," she says, because travel bans are issued even if there is no proof of intent to abduct a child.

"To accuse a woman of a crime she did not commit and most likely will not commit is not in the spirit of democracy," she said. "There is an assumption with immigrant women that they will abduct their children. Many came here as Zionists, but they feel closed in, locked up and disillusioned. The longer they are in this situation, the more desperate they become."

"We, as the families, feel betrayed," Levy continued. "The only way to maintain a normal relationship with family abroad is to fly back and forth. Israel is putting a stop to normal contact between families. It is taking away something very essential to people."

Hatikvah, or "the hope," was named for the line in the Israeli national anthem expressing the wish to be "a free people in our land." The organization, based in Holland, collects and shares information and provides emotional support to its target constituency.

The group, which held its second meeting earlier this month, is forming an international board of social work and women's rights and children's rights experts.

Israel is one of about 70 signatories to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, a treaty that stipulates an expeditious method to return a child taken from one member nation to another. The convention, which is signed by more than 70 countries, calls for the protection of children from the "wrongful removal or retention and to establish procedures to ensure their prompt return to the State of their habitual residence."

Levy believes the convention should be sufficient to ensure the safe return of children, but experts say that however painful the issue can be for families, the legal implications are complex.

According to Justice Ministry estimates, there are about 30 cases a year of children being abducted from Israel to other convention members.

"It's not enough that a country has signed the Hague Convention, because there are examples of countries that signed it and still didn't return children," says Judith Meisels of the Judith Meisels Law Offices in Tel Aviv, an expert on family law. "Even when a child is returned [according to the Hague Convention] it can take months and sometimes more. But there is no guarantee that a child will be returned because some countries abide [by the convention] more and some countries abide [by it] less. In the U.S., for example, if the children are American citizens, they are not always returned."

Meisels says that it is especially easy to block a child's exit when one of the parents is not a native Israeli because the court can be persuaded of the added risk of abduction.

Not so rare

"The concern is that a vacation will turn into something more than that," Meisels explains. "It's a real concern and it doesn't just happen once in a blue moon. The court sees preventing child abduction as an essential goal, and that interest prevails over the child's right to travel.

According to Dr. Rhona Schuz, co-director of the Center for the Rights of the Child and Family at the Shaarei Mishpat Law College, Israel has a relatively high incidence of child abduction. "The statistics suggest that child abduction is more of an issue here than in other countries," she said. "Of all the applications made under the Hague Convention worldwide, two per cent deal with abductions from Israel. That doesn't sound like a lot, but compare Israel's population to the 45 other states [who are in the study] and the number is relatively high.... There are so many immigrants living here and there is a real temptation to take children back home."

Men suffer too

Men's rights groups point out that the issue is not limited to women. "Women use passport holds on children all the time," Gadi Pickholz, chair of the Israel Fathers Rights Advocacy Council (IFRAC), says. "I have a daughter who is 13 and hasn't been able to leave the country to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah with my family in the States. There are American men married to Israeli women in the same situation. There is no question that in a marriage between a native Israeli and an immigrant, the court does not appropriately recognize the fact that one of these families does not live in Israel."

Women who have joined Hatikvah say there is comfort in knowing that other immigrant mothers share their pproblem.

"I have no family here and being a single parent with no family is very hard," said E.

"It's a good feeling to know that there are others out there like me, because this isn't the sort of thing people talk about. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way and I want to help other women from making those same mistakes." "I used to love Israel," E. added, "but now I feel like a prisoner."