Try to find an estimate of how many women are enslaved by husbands who won’t give them gets (Jewish divorces) and what amounts to a best guess is 10,000 women in Israel with about the same number of men. In the United States and Canada a survey conducted by North American Study of Agunot by Barbara Zakheim, founder of the Greater Washington Coalition Against Domestic Abuse, found 462 women during a five-year period. The number is deemed to be at least three times higher because of the 70 community-based, social service Jewish organizations sent surveys, only 20 responded. From some personal experience, there are at least four known agunot in Bergen County, where some people agree that even one is too many.
While many ultra-orthodox communities deny that they have such problems, the lie to that was proven nationally when an F.B.I. investigation uncovered what amounted to a business orchestrated by two rabbis and a gang of thugs who were paid to kidnap and beat recalcitrant husbands into agreeing to give the get. Costing about $60,000 a pop, it was a last desperate act resorted to by women who were chained to their estranged husbands for eternity, in a limbo that prevented them from ever marrying, while their husbands could remarry with permission of 100 rabbis (a document issued by a Beit Din, a court of Jewish law).
One Chabad rabbi familiar with the situation—when asked about the beating that almost took place, the one that was halted by the F.B.I. and resulted in the arrests of the rabbis, who are now in prison—said the husband deserved what he was going to get.
The problem is ages old. Women want to be divorced from their husbands but can’t remarry without receiving a get. Recalcitrant husbands see this as a means to extortion.
Hundreds of years ago, some rabbis found equitable solutions to the situation. In the19th century rabbi, Rabbi Akiva Eiger released agunot and stated, “The time is right to release a Jewish wife from being an agunah, and Jewish women should not be hefker (in limbo). Thus we are going to be lenient with an agunah.”
In the 13th century, R’ Meir of Rothenburg ruled that a wife be set free because she was married under false pretenses—had she known he’d be cruel, she would not have married him.
But today, even if husbands are not recalcitrant, it’s not easy to find a court whose credentials are such that the gets they grant are universally accepted.
The Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA) puts out a Bet Din listing but warns that “In order for the get to be universally recognized with the Jewish world, it is essential that the Get procedures should be effected under the auspices of an Orthodox Beth Din (court of Jewish religious law). A get that is done through a Conservative or Reform rabbi is not currently recognized in Israel.”
While there are many more Beth Dins, not all of them will adjudicate divorces. According to ORA’s list the following are universally accepted and are located the closest to Bergen County:
The Beth Din of Elizabeth, in New Jersey.
The Beth Din of America in New York.
The Bais Din Tzedek U’Mishpat Rabbinical Court in Brooklyn and
The Beit Din of Philadelphia.
One hopes that soon a new International Agunah Beit Din, backed by a Haredi jurist with the goal of freeing “chained women” will be added to that list. Volunteering to form the court—an idea discussed at great length at an agunah conference hosted by The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) in June 2013—was Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a lecturer in Yeshiva University’s IBC (Israel By Choice) program for 20 years, a former president of the Religious Zionists of America affiliated with Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in Jerusalem and former rabbi of the Young Israel of Hillcrest. He is considered a centrist among the Orthodox. “I am not a revolutionary, and I understand that halacha moves slowly, but it’s been too slow. It’s time,” he said at the time.
By Anne Phyllis Pinzow
