Another BT story goes wrong

Just another BT story who goes wrong. From a very intricate juridical story, that is the most entertaining and suspense part of the book, my selective attention focused on the ways in which two people apparently in love fell apart due to misunderstandings around religion.

After her husband dies, Isabelle decides to make aliya after a short visit to Eilat. A couple of months after, she moves first to Ra'ana and after to Tel Aviv, while facing the local bureaucracy and trying to get used with the daily life. 

Complaining about the 'bureaucratic otherness' of Israel is a common complain in many books and statements of people moving to Israel from US or Western Europe. It may look at a completely different reality, but looking a bit into the history and recent social issues facing a relatively young country, there is obviously an explanation for the gap. Israel is not a perfect country and part of moving from a country to another is facing a different culture and reality.

After a while, Isabelle is getting married with a handsome man who's becoming more and more religious. She is not and never intended to be one and this decision, that seems unilateral according to the book, but adopted without too much discussions, it seems, will set them apart. This is the part which interests me a lot. Obviously, during the BT process, there are always problems, especially if starting from a completely secular background. The first temptation is to start being 'frum' in only a couple of hours or days, as there is a miraculous pill that will delete from your mind and behavior the whole years of non-religious life. But hopefully, there is not and the 'return' takes many years and even many more mistakes. The husband, who's somehow 'famous' in Tel Aviv for being the roller skating bearded man, started the teshuva process with Chabad - not the right moment to express now what I think about it, involving his wife through various programs for women. 

After receiving the get - she is introducing the procedure in the book, but omit to mention that compared with other countries, in Israel is easier to get it compared to, for instance, America - afraid that her soon will be forced to follow a religious education, she kidnaps the kid and pays a significant amount of money for getting the boy out of Israel. 

Five years after intensive trials, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg decides that she can keep the kid. At least for now, there is the end of the story. She cannot go back to Israel unless she will face 20 years of prison, he cannot see the boy. The boys grows up in Switzerland. 

I am not sure if I understood properly that the father doesn't contribute at all financially to the education of the kid. He also had apparently some violence outbursts and was shortly married once again, before getting married a third time. 

There are a lot of gaps in the story and many questions regarding the ways in which the religious change took place. Some big or small failures on the way may explain the dramatic outcome.