Jerusalem Post 
Thursday, January 28, 1999 

Matti Caspi charged with bigamy
By Heidi J. Gleit

Singer Matti Caspi was charged with bigamy yesterday in Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court.  According to the charge sheet, he did not obtain a legal divorce from his first wife, Dorine Lubotsky Caspi, before marrying Gal (Rachel) Winger in 1994 and is technically married to both of them today.  Singer Mati Caspi Dorine Caspi declined to comment on the charges. Caspi himself could not be reached for comment.  Caspi, 51, of Kfar Vradim, married Dorine Caspi here in 1975. In 1990, he filed for a divorce from her in Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court. The divorce proceedings did not advance over the next few years and when he moved to the US in 1993 he turned to a Beverly Hills rabbi, Gabriel Cohen, for assistance.  Cohen contacted the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court in March 1994 and asked it to grant Caspi a divorce or annulment, writing that if the court did not do so Caspi would leave Judaism. Three months later, without the approval of the Tel Aviv court, Cohen himself provided Caspi with a halachic divorce, or get, and sent copies to both Dorine Caspi and the Tel Aviv court.  The Tel Aviv court, however, refused to recognize the get that Cohen provided, saying it did not meet halachic standards.  Despite this, Caspi married Rachel Winger in a civil ceremony in California a few months later.  Caspi has tried unsuccessfully over the years to alter the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court's decision.  Caspi, one of this country's foremost pop stars in the '70s and '80s, and his difficult divorce proceedings from his first wife were widely reported on in gossip columns in the early '90s.  In an interview with The Jerusalem Post shortly after he moved back here in 1997, he said that the rabbinical court had not canceled his Los Angeles divorce but had refused to submit the Los Angeles divorce decree to the Interior Ministry.  As a result, his Israeli identification papers listed him as married to his previous wife.  "They've invented a new kind of Halacha," Caspi said in the interview. "I'm considered divorced from Dorine, but she is still married to me. Under the new Halacha, I am a bigamist with a license."