State accepts Amir-Trimbobler marriage

By DAN IZENBERG
The State Attorney's Office informed the High Court of Justice on Sunday that it had decided to instruct the Interior Ministry to register Yigal Amir and Larissa Trimbobler as married. Deputy State Attorney Shai Nitzan told the court it was accepting the ruling of the Jerusalem District Rabbinical Court on July 10, 2005, to recognize the marriage. Amir is serving a life sentence for assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. The Prisons Service said it would continue to refuse to allow Amir and Trimbobler to hold a wedding ceremony or spend time together alone. However, early last year, Amir's father, Shlomo, came to visit him in jail. He left the cell with a ring and a marriage contract and brought them to Trimbobler in the presence of a rabbi and two witnesses. After the ceremony, Amir and Trimbobler declared that they were married and applied to the rabbinical court. In July, the Jerusalem District Rabbinical Court approved the procedure and declared they were married. When the Interior Ministry initially refused to register the couple as married, Trimbobler petitioned the High Court of Justice to force it to do so. In his response to the petition, Nitzan pointed out that the Supreme Court had ruled on many occasions that private marriages violated the public ordinance. As a result, the Interior Ministry asked the attorney-general and the state attorney for their opinion on the request to register Amir and Trimbobler. The State Attorney's Office found that in addition to the Supreme Court rulings against private marriages, there was also a rule according to the 'Excommunication of Jerusalem' code, preventing private marriages. It also found that the rabbinical courts themselves did not have a consistent record on requests to recognize private marriages. Furthermore, in the case of Amir and Trimbobler, one of the three dayanim (rabbinical judges) had ruled against recognizing the marriage while two voted in favor. At the end of the investigation, and after the rabbinical court corrected its original ruling by adding the date of the decision, the state agreed to recognize the marriage, wrote Nitzan.