By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Divorce is never an easy process. There is the contracting of lawyers, the dividing of money and property, the arranging of custody agreements if there are children, and the inevitable emotional fallout. But for many observant Jewish women, including those profiled in the 2004 documentary Mekudeshet: Sentenced to Marriage, all of those concerns are secondary. First, they must convince their husbands to allow them to legally end their marriages.
The film, which screened at Hillel at the University of Washington on Oct. 29 at an event co-sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women and Jewish Family Service’s Project DVORA, follows three Israeli women struggling to obtain a get (a divorce) from their husbands, and navigating the male-dominated world of rabbinical courts when their husbands consistently refuse.
According to Jewish law, husbands must voluntarily grant their wives a get. If they choose not to, women can become, literally, trapped in their marriages, unable to move forward with their own lives until their estranged husbands decide to release them. They often end up bartering with their husbands, relinquishing decisions about child support and visitation privileges.
In some instances, wives even resort to bribing their husbands for divorce. In Israel, a man who refuses to give his wife a get can be arrested and jailed until he consents, but, as Mekudeshet makes clear, this course of action is a last resort for rabbinic courts, which often leave the burden of escaping a failed marriage to the wife, even in clear cases of abuse or adultery.
Women awaiting a get are known as agunot — which translates as “chained women.”
The film was followed by a discussion led by Rivy Poupko Kletenik, head of school at the Seattle Hebrew Academy and Elizabeth Davis, a NCJW board member.
Kletenik spoke on halachic issues surrounding Jewish divorce. Her husband, Moshe, who serves as rabbi at the Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath Orthodox shul, has become a local champion for domestic violence prevention, receiving the Take Action award from the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence last month.
Kletenik began by answering the question of how the refusal of a get could be rationalized by men who are otherwise religiously observant Jews.
“You can be a boar, a disgusting human being, and still follow all of the mitzvot,” she said.
Davis followed by speaking about her personal experience as an agunah.
Although she was raised in a Reform household, Davis later gravitated toward Orthodox Judaism. When she met her husband-to-be, he was not Orthodox himself, but agreed that he would be observant for her sake. They were married in the Orthodox tradition. However, after several years, it became clear that the marriage was not going to last and Davis and her former husband began the process of getting a civil divorce, which her lawyer had advised her to deal with before worrying about a get.
“But then things started to get nasty and he said, ‘I’m not giving you a get,’ because I was observant and he wasn’t, so it didn’t matter to him. But he knew it mattered to me,” she said.
In both Israel and the U.S., some strides have been made in recent years toward protecting Jewish women from being trapped in their marriages by men who refuse to sign a get. Just last week, Israel’s Knesset passed a law that separates the necessity of a get from the process of dividing assets in a divorce. This way, women won’t have to remain financially bound to husbands who refuse to grant them a get.
Similarly, in 1992, the state of New York passed a its own “get law,” which requires men to get a religious divorce before they will be granted a civil one. The Orthodox Union requires couples getting married to sign a document stating that they understand what is necessary to end a marriage. Several organizations maintain registries with the names of men who refuse to give their wives gets. These men may be prevented from making aliyah or even from attending some synagogues.
However, Kletenik said, in Washington State, where lawmakers are careful to maintain clear separation between church and state, there exists no legal recourse for agunot.
In the months that followed her separation, Davis worried that she, like the women in the film, would have to face a long battle to get her husband to agree to give her the get. She had hopes that she would some day be able to remarry and have more children (she has one child with her first husband), but moving on with her life simply wasn’t a possibility while she was still, in the eyes of Jewish law, married.
“I knew that, halachically, those children would be mumzers,” Davis said.
A mumzer (Hebrew for “bastard”) is the child of an adulterous relationship and, traditionally, would be barred from marrying a Jew him or her self. Oddly enough, if a man has a child with another woman while he is still married, that child is not considered a mumzer.
Eventually, however, in 2001, Davis’ husband consented to give her a get, provided he didn’t have to be present for the signing. Davis said she arranged for the ceremony to take place as quickly as possible for fear that he would change his mind. Rabbis at Sephardic Bikur Holim oversaw the signing of the get, but after she had received the document, Davis said she was surprised by the comments of one of the rabbis present.
“After it was over, the rabbi said to me, ‘I hope you you’re never in this position again. I hope next time you’ll work harder to save your marriage,’” she recalled. “I left feeling so dirty. I never would have been there if there had been another way.”
Kletenik said that she was saddened to hear that such attitudes still existed in the Seattle Jewish community in this day in age, but at the same time, was not surprised.
“Progress sometimes moves very slowly, especially for women,” she said.
Michelle Lifton, director for Jewish Family Service’s domestic violence arm Project DVORA, said that refusal to sign a get often goes hand in hand with other instances of spousal abuse.
“When [Orthodox] women come to me, there’s always a get issue. It’s a control tactic, and that’s part of domestic violence,” she said.
Overlooking the agunot problem goes hand in hand with the Jewish community’s tendency to ignore other forms of domestic violence, she added.
Despite their struggles with their husbands, the courts and a law that seems like an unfair double standard, none of the women in Mekudeshet broke with Judaism as a result of their experiences. Likewise, Davis said that just because some elements of halachah may, at times, place women in difficult positions, does not mean it doesn’t still have value for her life. Despite her time as an agunah, she said, her faith is still as strong as ever.
“You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. There’s just too much good that Judaism brings to my life,” she said. “Although if I was still suffering with this, I might be saying something different.”