FRANCINE KLAGSBRUN
FRANCINE KLAGSBRUN This is the Year of the Agunah. An agunah (literally, a chained woman) is a woman trapped in an unwanted marriage because she cannot obtain a get, or Jewish divorce, from her...
...Many of us outside Orthodoxy—and even those of us deeply dedicated to feminist goals—have nodded our heads sympathetically, occasionally dipped into our purses to help out, but essentially stayed uninvolved...
...We saw this as their problem...
...But the continued pressures of agunah supporters have begun to make inroads...
...Maybe...
...For example, individuals, foundations and agencies that fund Orthodox yeshivot should insist that these institutions train their rabbis in contemporary (not only talmudic) marriage and family matters...
...We can put the agunah and related problems on our personal and communal agendas...
...Recently, the cause has become more sinister...
...In Jewish law, the power to dissolve a marriage lies in the hands of the husband, who must grant his wife a get of his own will...
...For years now activist Orthodox women have organized and struggled to remedy the abuses of Jewish divorce law, and I'm ashamed to say they have organized and struggled alone...
...In one case I know of, middle-aged parents used up their own savings to help pay their daughter's estranged husband $50,000 for his gel...
...And at their last convention, the Rabbinical Council of America, the central body of Orthodox rabbis, accepted a resolution requiring couples to sign a prenuptial agreement designed to forestall get blackmail in the event of divorce...
...For the problem of the get can affect anyone, from the Conservative woman who marries an Orthodox man to the parent whose daughter weds an Israeli...
...We were wrong...
...Francine Klag.sbrun's most recent book...
...ting around...
...An agunah (literally, a chained woman) is a woman trapped in an unwanted marriage because she cannot obtain a get, or Jewish divorce, from her husband...
...Children of a man who remarries without a get, however, are legitimate...
...They are also the chief arbitrators of property and custody settlements between disputing partners...
...Mixed Feelings: Love, Hale, Rivalry, and Reconciliation Among Brothers and Sisters (Bantam, 1992), was published in sofkover in October...
...In earlier days, the main source of the problem was men who deserted their wives or men lost in wars but not definitively known to be dead...
...Within the last year, Orthodox women's groups, working with Jewish women's organizations of varying religious viewpoints and from countries around the world, have created the International Coalition for Agunah Rights (ICAR), and they have proclaimed this year—through 1994—the Year of the Agunah...
...More important, when Jewish women suffer, the entire community needs to heed their pain...
...What can we do...
...we had plenty of our own...
...A major issue has been the reluctance of rabbinic authorities in the United States or Israel to enact legislation that could alleviate the situation for women...
...As things stand now, rabbinic law courts, composed of three rabbis, are the only recourse many women have when a husband withholds a get...
...Without a get, a woman may not remarry...
...Never mind that in the twelfth century Maimonides ruled that a recalcitrant husband may be flogged until he says "I am willing...
...Conservative Judaism has worked around them by establishing a central beil din, a rabbinic court, with the power to annul a marriage when a husband is recalcitrant...
...not a women's matter, a community one...
...But for the Orthodox, there has been no ignoring and no getI'm ashamed to say that agunot, women unable to marry because their husbands refuse to give them a Jetvish divorce, have struggled alone...
...The council had adopted a similar resolution in the past and then withdrawn it as too coercive...
...Today's rabbis have taken the narrowest approach to interpreting the law...
...We can learn to understand the issues...
...Nor does a civil divorce satisfy Jewish law...
...A man may withhold a get in order to extort great sums of money...
...Or he may simply want to punish his wife, to exact revenge, to make her beg...
...In another case, a woman in an abusive marriage, fearing for her children's safety, has remained an agunah for years rather than give in to her husband's custody demands...
...How is a man able to do these things...
...But this is the Year of the Agunah, a time to set things right...
...Dreaming...
...They are calling on all of us to pay attention to the tragedy of the agunah, and help...
...not an Orthodox issue, an all-denominational one...
...Although a wife must consent to a divorce, she has no right to issue a get...
...Surely with serious thought and determined purpose, our rabbis can find a halachic means to revamp those laws and establish that in Judaism, marriage is a true partnership between wife and husband...
...So the pressure needs to be kept up, with backing from the whole community, to make this resolution stick— word-of-mouth pressure, financial support for agunah activists pressure, and as much press and publicity pressure as possible...
...He may use the get as a weapon to gain custody of his children...
...The problem of the get has created almost a thousand agunot in the United States and an estimated 16,000 in Israel, where religious law alone regulates marriage and divorce...
...In fact, under the present system, litigants themselves pay the belt din fees, and because husbands usually have more money than their wives, they also have undue influence on the judges...
...The more I read and hear about the agunah situation, the more I am convinced that this is not "their" problem, it is ours...
...The institutions that train rabbis should also be held responsible for undoing such inequalities and standardizing their courts so that all follow the same—ethical—procedures...
...In Israel, the chief rabbis have said that a committee of women's representatives and rabbis who deal with divorce cases will discuss ways to help agunot...
...Finally, we can urge rabbinic leaders of all denominations to address not only the problem of the agunah, but the very basic anti-women, anti-family Jewish divorce laws...
...Reform Judaism has ignored these laws and not required a gel at all...
...Yet few of these rabbis have any training in dealing with marital problems, and fewer still are inclined to stand up for a woman against her husband...
...The excuse they use is that because a divorce must be granted freely, they may not create rules that might smack of coercion...
...if she does, the union is considered adulterous and children born of it are seen as mamzerim, bastards, forbidden to marry other Jews...
Vol. 18 • December 1993 • No. 6
