The Price of a Phone Call

Haredi woman sues Pelephone for 'ruining her life'

An ultra-Orthodox woman filed a NIS 2.5 million (some $653,000) damages suit against Pelephone Communications, one of Israel's mobile phone service providers, claiming breach of contract which led to the "destruction of her home life."

According to the suit, filed last week, a company representative breached the of confidentiality clause in the service provider-subscriber contract, by providing the woman's husband with a detailed account of her calls.

Once in possession of the information, which suggested she had phone conversations with another man, the woman's husband filed for divorce and she found herself ostracized from the Orthodox circle she had known her entire life.


"I told them it could happen, I warned them, I begged, I explained it could come to murder," she told Ynet.



"Her life was ruined," Attorney Guy Ophir added. "She's lost everything – her family, her friends, her community...

...According to the claim, the woman's husband showed up at a Pelephone customer service center one day and told the company representative that his wife was in labor, and needed to see her calls' listing immediately. He then proceeded to call a woman who identified herself as his wife and gave the representative permission to disclose the information. The service representative failed to follow company procedures, which require a series of precautionary measures, and did not ask for the pin number, opting to simply disclose the information.

...Several days after the husband found out about her conversations with another man, she said, she was subpoenaed to the regional Rabbinical Court and issued a divorce. The Rabbinical Court gave custody of the couple's two-year-old daughter to her father and forbade the woman from seeing her...