Washington, DC: As fewer and fewer secular Israeli couples register for rabbinic marriage, the founder of Israel’s first feminist-Orthodox group, “Kolech,” recommended that secular Jewish women boycott the institution entirely. In a recent conference on “chained women” who cannot obtain religious divorces, Kolech leader Chana Kehat raised a stir by stating that the more distance women maintained from the rabbinate, “the better for the whole nation.” Kolech, known in English as the Religious Women’s Forum, aims to improve the status of women by deep-seated change in the Orthodox community, is a major grantee of the New Israel Fund, and also participates in NIF/SHATIL’s Pluralism Project.