NEW YORK (JTA) — For years, Rachel Light felt like a
hostage, worried she would be forever trapped in her marriage to Eben Light.
Even in April 2012, after Eben was arrested for allegedly
threatening her and was slapped with a restraining order, Rachel was unable to
get a writ of Jewish divorce, or get.
That made her an agunah — Hebrew for “chained woman” —
putting her in the company of hundreds of other Orthodox women who cannot
remarry because their husbands refuse to grant them divorces according to
Jewish law, or halachah.
Fortunately for Rachel, who was Modern Orthodox, she and her
husband had signed a halachic (Jewish ritual) prenuptial agreement. In 2013,
hers was the first such prenup to be enforced in a U.S. civil court. Light
obtained her get and a substantial financial settlement in Connecticut.
“I’m so thankful that I happened to have signed it, because
I don’t know that I’d be remarried today with an awesome, wonderful new family without
it,” Light told JTA. “But nevertheless, it’s not going to be able to help
everybody in every case, and I would love to see a solution that could.”
First developed in the 1990s in an attempt to protect women
from becoming agunot, halachic prenuptial agreements stipulate that the couple
in a dissolving marriage must come before a predetermined court of Jewish law.
If the man refuses to provide the get, he must provide a financial settlement,
typically in the range of $150 per day — an agreement enforceable in civil
court.
Yet while halachic prenuptial agreements have been touted as
a solution to the agunah problem, they have hardly been a panacea — because
many are reluctant to sign them in the first place.
“Those who are most likely to need to use it are least
likely to sign it,” said Rabbi Jeremy Stern, director of the Organization for
the Resolution of Agunot, or ORA, which says it deals with more than 150 cases
of agunot per year.
The problem is unique to the Orthodox world, because
non-Orthodox movements have rejected or found ways around traditional rules
that give husbands practically all the leverage. And, frustratingly for
advocates on behalf of agunot, most Orthodox couples hail from segments of the
community that aren’t interested in halachic prenups.
“The problem is in the black-hat and haredi community, where
they don’t have prenups or rabbis don’t agree to enforce the idea of having a
prenup,” said Stanley Goodman, director of an organization known as GET —
Getting Equal Treatment.
Rabbi Avi Shafran, spokesman for the haredi Orthodox Agudath
Israel of America, said Aguda does not advocate the use of halachic prenups.
“There is a concern that introducing and focusing on the
possible dissolution of a marriage when it is just beginning is not conducive
to the health of the marriage,” Shafran said. “I don’t think it is really
possible to gauge their efficacy without data, and in any event, it would be
impossible to know when the existence of a prenup might have eased the way
toward a divorce when a marriage might, with effort and determination, have
been saved.”
Even the centrist Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America,
which reiterated its support for prenuptial agreements in a statement last
week, does not require its member rabbis to request a halachic prenup before
performing weddings.
“Rabbinic authorities that are guiding the RCA, with whom we
consult, feel it is inappropriate to make an absolute obligation for members,”
Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice-president of the RCA, told JTA.
The RCA’s public statement on prenups came on the heels of
several high-profile cases of get refusal. In October, the FBI announced it had
arrested a group of men in New York who were accused of taking money to use
violence to compel recalcitrant husbands to give gets. Their methods allegedly
included kidnapping and the use of electric cattle prods. Agunot were paying
tens of thousands of dollars for the service.
In early November, the New York Post featured on its front
page the story of an agunah from Lakewood, N.J., Gital Dodelson, who said her
husband’s family had demanded $350,000 and custody of the couple’s son in
exchange for a get. A storm of media coverage followed, prompting the husband’s
father and uncle to temporarily resign from their positions at Artscroll, a
leading Orthodox publishing house.
One of the main problems with the halachic prenup, advocates
say, is the lack of enforcement of its financial penalties.
Although the agreements stipulate a daily fine to be paid by
the husband to the wife while a get is refused, these fines are nearly always
waived in exchange for the get itself, according to Rabbi Joel Weissman,
director of the RCA-affiliated Beth Din of America, the religious court that
oversees many agunah cases. In current versions of its halachic prenup, the
Beth Din of America exercises absolute control over the payments and may waive
them at its discretion.
“They’re emasculating their own prenuptial,” Susan Aranoff,
co-director of the advocacy organization Agunah International, said of the Beth
Din of America. “The way the Beth Din enforces it is a smokescreen that
deprives the woman and does not protect her.”
In response, Weissman told JTA: “In a vast majority of
cases, the woman will walk home with the get and not push the case for
support.”
Rachel Light says it wasn’t until she took her agreement to
civil court in New Haven that she was able to receive her get. Her then-husband
had avoided multiple summonses to the beit din without any consequences, she
said.
In such cases, the beit din, as an extralegal entity, has
only one recourse: to issue a seruv, a religious contempt-of-court order akin
to excommunication, in which the recalcitrant party is banned from
participation in synagogues and other community institutions. In cases where
individuals are indifferent to this exclusion, or communities are unwilling to
cooperate, the seruv may be ineffective.
While civil courts have more tools at their disposal, that
route presents challenges, too. Light’s case took a long time, cost a lot of
money and ultimately did not guarantee that her husband would grant her a
Jewish divorce — only that he would have to pay if he didn’t.
“I would love to think that our rabbis could come up with a
more direct, protective solution, rather than a circuitous thing that maybe some
rabbis will use and maybe some couples will sign — which you have to take to
civil court anyway,” Light said of halachic prenups. “I would love to see our
rabbis take this on full force and say this is something that we won’t allow.”
Judy Heicklen, president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist
Alliance, which will feature a session on agunot at its Dec. 7-8 conference in
New York, says a Jewish legal solution must be found to obviate the need for
enforcement in civil court.
No comments:
Post a Comment