4 Year Child Custody Fight

Shalom & thank you for reading!

If you know me then you likely know what my family and I had to endure in the last 4 years, or at least parts of it. For everyone else, here is a synopsis:

Following my graduate studies, I decided to make Aliyah, serve in a combat unit and volunteered in helping others in need for several years. I later got married and the joy of my life was born in 2010. It was soon revealed that my son had a disease preventing him to do certain things (contact me in private for more information) but I dealt with it to the best of my ability and provided him balance, safety and freedom, giving him love and opportunities to discover and learn. Such a beautiful story would have lasted much longer if it was not for his mother who was doing the opposite of me, although it took me time to partially realize so and her intentions. She was overprotecting and controlling him from the beginning, to later isolate him hermetically from the outside world. Just before my son turned 5, his mother kidnapped him by surprise and filed for divorce soon after, taking the most tragic and disgusting paths, accusing me of the worst crimes (except for terrorism…) causing me to have a restraining order for a few months until being fully checked and evaluated which I successfully did. This was done following 9 police accusations and 13 questionings, meets and custodies at police stations. The problem is that the judicial system is slow, ineffective and that my now ex-wife refused to be evaluated 18 times at a specific center, not to mention several others, and changed lawyers continuously to reach her current 16th lawyer, refusing any possible means of evaluations for over 3 years.

The tragedy of it is that my son did not see me from age 4 and 10 months until his 8th birthday, and that I did not see him at all or speak with him for that entire period. Thanks to his school director when he was in first grade, the social workers were alerted of abnormal behaviours and after another long fight between the authorities and my ex-wife, and assisted by my own lawyers, my son was removed and placed into an emergency foster home for nearly 9 months, following an attempt by his mother to flee the country with my son and with the help of her lawyer, but luckily caught by the police on-time…

At first my son was in a very traumatised situation and would refuse to see me or speak with me, but slowly accepted to receive drawings and presents from me, meet me and rather quickly reconnected with me naturally. Despite having suffered heavy brainwashing for such a long period of his short life, I gained back his trust and a few months ago was allowed to have him for full weekends. A few months ago our judge requested for a parental evaluation in order to decide on custody and the recommendation to the court was clear: my son should be with me and his mother received supervised visitation once a week. The judge confirmed the decision but my ex-wife appealed and forced us all to go to Appeal Court once again and likely all the way to the Supreme Court eventually as she has done before. She constantly submitted files to slow down the process causing my son not to be released from the foster home as scheduled. On the last delay, the call I received from my son was heartbreaking and I could not tell him when this judicial mess would end but this time ended sooner than later.

Not only have I used all my financial resources but owe money to several people now, and same for my parents and close friends who have helped me through such hardship. I now turn to the crowd-funding community for help hoping I can continue this “war” that my son and I are forced to fight for his wellbeing and safety, and to keep us united. However the only way forward is to keep on affording the lawyers that have been involved on this case for the last four years (19 court hearings in family court, 7 court hearings in Appeal Court and even reaching the Supreme Court, not to mention other civil courts she got involved trying to complicate the situation).

During these 4 years of solitude, stress and hard times causing periods of depression, besides my family, friends and work, two things kept me together and helped in my daily life: writing and drawing. A personal letter to my son explaining him what I / we had gone through ended up being so long that it became a book of nearly 300 pages, and my drawings were exhibited in galleries this year and other exhibition will follow overseas as well (Contact me in private for more information about the art work).

My lawyers estimated the general future expenses to be around US $34,000 (120,000 NIS) until my son can finally be "legally secured” with me and no longer be threatened to be removed from me or placed in an undesired environment. Only this week was his leave from the foster home confirmed and he is currently at home finally for the first time in almost 4 years.

All the donations will go towards covering legal and court fees; any money left will go towards editing and publishing my book to be distributed in several languages in order to reach as many people as possible and inform about such extreme cases which impact more parents and children than we can think of. It is time for justice to act swifter and do its utmost to avoid the destruction of young souls and their families. Time is of the essence and such unnecessary sufferings must be avoided by changing laws in many countries which still leave room for ill people to abuse the system.

I thank you very much for your attention and look forward to communicating with you shall you have any question or wish to hear more about this ongoing battle for my son.

David