Linor Abargil Says She Stopped Physical Contact With Her Husband for Two Years Before Marriage

Linor Abargil, who has been in the public eye for nearly three decades since winning Miss Israel and then Miss World in 1998, says she did not allow her husband, Oron Kalfon, to touch her for two years after she became more religious. Abargil, who studied acting, married, divorced, remarried, became a mother and later returned to observance, is now married to Kalfon, a co-owner of the Gaga talent agency, which represents artists including Static and Agam Buhbut.

The couple met before Abargil became religious and initially dated as a secular pair. In a clip from the show "Haredim: The Real World," airing Monday night on Reshet 13, she describes how a Torah lesson about the prohibition on physical contact changed everything. "When I met my husband I was not religious yet, we started dating as a secular couple," she says. "Then I started strengthening myself and going to Torah classes, and one day the rabbi spoke in class about the prohibition of touch. I looked at him and said, 'You are not touching me anymore,' and he said, 'No way.'"

Abargil said the boundary lasted until their wedding. "I did not let him touch me for two years, until we got married, after we had already been together and had touched, which is a hundred times harder," she said. "He thought I was fooling him, but I just told him he was going back to his father and I was returning to my mother." She added that he would pick her up from Netanya each time, "like 16-year-olds."

Describing her religious turnaround, she said it felt like starting over from scratch. "They said that if you become religious, you become religious and everything is erased, so I said, for me, we are starting from the beginning."