Last month, an FBI sting operation netted a rabbi, the head
of a New York yeshiva and eight other men, two of whom were volunteers at an
organization for at-risk Jewish youth.
Rabbi Mendel Epstein made his living
campaigning at the rabbinical courts on behalf of women whose husbands refused
to grant them religious divorces; this past summer, he wrote and released a
“Bill of Rights of a Jewish Wife.
” But he and his coterie seem to have taken
his advocacy too far—specifically, they’ve been accused of exacting up to
$60,000 from despairing wives in exchange for kidnapping and torturing their
husbands, with the aim of coercing the men into signing the Jewish divorce
document. All 10 defendants were initially denied bail after appearing in
Federal District Court in Trenton, New Jersey (bail was later set for all men
involved, and all 10 defendents pleaded not guilty).
They’ve been called
unlikely criminals. They have also, albeit less frequently, been called
unlikely feminists.
The unsealed federal charges conjure up unsettling images.
A
rabbi and his assistants wielding a cattle prod. Or congregating in a New
Jersey warehouse with masks, ropes and scalpels to finalize their plan to
kidnap the fictional husband of an FBI agent posing as an Orthodox Jewish
woman. Rabbi Epstein and Rabbi Martin Wolmark of Yeshiva Shaarei Torah
allegedly convened their own rabbinical court, or beit din, and issued an edict
authorizing the use of violence in this case, for which they supposedly charged
the undercover agent $10,000. According to officials, they then asked for an
additional $50,000 to carry out the abduction. The sum may be a testament to
their greed or their immorality or their commitment to the cause. Certainly,
though, it’s a testament to the persisting desperation of observant women
caught in the religious divorce process.
By Jewish law, a husband must present his wife with a get, a
document of divorce, for the religious marriage to be terminated—even if a
civil divorce decree is already in effect. Without a get, she cannot remarry,
lest she be shunned by the Orthodox community. And any children she may have by
a different man will be considered illegitimate and unable to marry within the
faith.
So clearly is the requirement for a get laid out in the religious
scripture, rabbinical authorities maintain that they’ve been left with little
leeway for interpretation. Thus the very few avenues of recourse available to
the get-less woman in the United States in 2013 are not so different from the
ones that were available to her in pre-war Europe. From Deuteronomy 24:1-2:
“When a man marries a woman or possesses her, if she is displeasing to him…he
shall write her a bill of divorce and place it in her hand, thus releasing her
from his household. When she thus leaves his household, she may go and marry
another man.”
A woman whose husband won’t give up the get is referred to
as an agunah, from the Hebrew for “chained,” and the condition is more common
than you might imagine. A survey spearheaded by Barbara Zakheim, co-founder of
the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA), found that between 2005 to
2010, there were over 460 cases of “shackled” Jewish women in North America, a
number that underrepresents the problem; the research team didn’t reach out to
agunot directly, but to domestic abuse and family service organizations—and by
and large, agencies serving more right-wing communities declined to
participate. Zakheim also found that a sizeable number of agunot were living in
poverty and not receiving any sort of spousal support.
“There were changes made
to halacha [Jewish law] during ancient times and in that respect, those ages
were more progressive than the one we’re living in now,” she said. “The
Orthodox rabbinate need to get their act together to come up with a halachic
solution. They have a lot to answer for.”
In Israel, noncompliant husbands are sometimes sent to jail
until they agree to sign the get. But America’s secular court system cannot
intervene in a religious divorce, leaving the agunah without many options.
A
rabbinical court might, if the man won’t respond to a summons, issue an order
of contempt, which essentially states that the woman’s husband has refused to
grant her a get and calls on the Jewish community to take a stand. She might
also approach an advocacy group like the Organization for the Resolution of
Agunot (ORA), a New York-based non-profit that, since its founding in 2002, has
resolved 205 agunah cases worldwide.
ORA works, free of charge, to open the
lines of communication between the two parties. Failing that, it exerts legal
and halachically sanctioned forms of pressure on the get withholder. “We see
the refusal to issue a get as a form of domestic abuse,” said Rabbi Jeremy
Stern, the organization’s executive director. “It’s not just about black and
blue marks. It’s about one person asserting their dominance over another.”
Almost always, ORA has found, a man’s motivations for
denying his wife a get are about maintaining power and control.
The religious
divorce document is a strong bargaining chip. It can be used as leverage in
negotiations over the house, the car, alimony, child support, custody and
visitation rights; indeed, the rabbis have become accustomed to asking the
husband what the get is going to “cost” his wife. It can also be used as a tool
of revenge or spite, or to force a woman to return to a marriage she doesn’t
want.
ORA will organize peaceful protests outside of the husband’s home,
attempt to ostracize him from the Jewish community and his synagogue, encourage
people to boycott his business, publicize his name in the papers and on social
media, constantly call his friends and family. But still a man with a get in
his pocket might stand fast, even if a significant period has passed since his
civil divorce was finalized. “Man,” Rabbi Stern said, as though addressing such
a fellow. “She’s just not that into you.”
Caroline Appell, a New Jersey woman, fought for her get for
six years. For the last four of those years, she was civilly divorced. Her
husband was ordered by the secular courts to pay a certain amount of alimony
and child support.
He wasn’t happy with the arrangement. “If I had agreed to
take nothing, he might’ve given me the get right away,” she ventured. “But I
had five kids to put through college.” ORA called her husband—ex-husband by
civil decree—once a week or so in an effort of persuasion. Ultimately, the
couple agreed to consult a beit din and sign a binding arbitration agreement,
which would make the ruling of the religious court enforceable in a civil one.
She knew she was liable to lose big, but Appell had become frantic.
“I was 46. Six years had gone by already. He’s from Morocco and I knew that he
could just pick up and leave, and I would never have the get.” The beit din
heard her husband’s terms and it met most of them: no alimony and limited child
support, which her ex-husband has since finished paying. “Was it the best
deal?” she asked. “No. Was it better than what I had before? Absolutely.”
Appell remarried just over a year ago—but not without first signing a Jewish
pre-nup. Such a document empowers the beit din to adjudicate a religious
divorce and stipulates that the husband must pay his wife $150, adjustable for
inflation, for every day that he refuses her a get while they’re separated.
Other agunot have not been so lucky, if waiting more than
half a decade for a religious divorce and forgoing alimony can be called that.
Perhaps the most high-profile American agunah, Tamar Epstein, is still without
a get, though she’s been civilly divorced from Aharon Friedman, a tax counsel
for the House Ways and Means Committee chaired by Rep. Dave Camp, since 2010.
Her supporters have blasted Congressman Camp, using the Web, the media and a
petition site to try and persuade him to lean on his aide; they’ve also rallied
in front of Friedman’s house and a third protest on Capitol Hill is in the
planning. A former agunah who prefers to remain anonymous described to me these
kinds of demonstrations, two of which were held outside of her ex-husband’s
home before he finally granted her a get last month. “People came who didn’t even
know me,” she said, including Epstein’s sister.
The protesters chanted her
husband’s name and carried signs bearing his photograph. In response, he
applied for sole custody, claiming that his wife and the community were harming
their children by making his refusal to participate in a religious ceremony a
public event.
“People don’t understand how desperate you feel,” the woman
told me. “It’s pretty unkind to demonstrate in front of someone’s house like
that, but what he was doing was really wrong. He gave no reason for not
granting the get other than that he didn’t want to. These agunot just don’t
know what else to do."
You hear stories. A woman who paid one million dollars for a
get. Another who hired a prostitute to tempt her get-withholding husband. One
wife, the last in a line of Holocaust survivors, whose husband refused her a
get until she was beyond childbearing age.
Physically and sexually abusive men
who retained the right to deny their wives religious divorces. The man’s
authority here is practically unassailable and the consequences, for the woman,
of moving on without his consent are crushing, making this fertile ground for
violence and corruption. Kidnappings are not new.
Rabbi Mendel Epstein was sued
in the late 90s by another Brooklyn rabbi who claimed a group of men shoved him
into a van and shocked his genitals with a stun gun. (The case was later
dropped.) In 2011, Rabbi David Wax of
Lakewood, N.J., was accused of pummeling an Israeli man and threatening him
with a body bag. (Wax's lawyers have maintained he is innocent of the
accusations.) Centuries ago, using force to summon forth a get was common, and
the plight of the agunah has not much evolved since then.
The Jewish pre-nuptial agreement is one widely accepted way
to minimize the problem, moving forward; increasingly, rabbis will not perform
a wedding without one. But proposals to reinterpret or update the law, or work
around it using “loopholes,” have been met with criticism and controversy.
Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a prominent figure in Orthodox Jewry in New York,
convened a beit din that for nearly 10 years, until his passing, annulled and
dissolved Jewish marriages. In that time, he declared released anywhere from
150 to 200 get-less women at their wits’ end—and he was attacked by, more or
less, the entire Orthodox rabbinate.
“A man who wants to hold a woman prisoner
who is clearly never coming back to him is imbalanced, obsessed,” said Susan
Aranoff, co-author of a forthcoming book on agunot, who worked closely with
Rabbi Rackman’s court. “He wants that last pound of flesh. And the law as read
by the rabbis puts all the power in his hands.”
She added: “We believe that there are remedies. It’s within
the possibility of Jewish law to say that these”—unions that don’t meet certain
expectations, with partners who don’t meet certain standards of behavior—“are
not marriages.” The rabbinate would disagree. But surely some of the women left
to decide between committing adultery, abandoning the faith or carrying on
alone and possibly childless feel caught in an insufferable limbo, not in any
kind of marriage.
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