c. 1998 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ As Moshe Morgenstern prepared for a recent trip to Israel, he received an anonymous call threatening to send him home from the Jewish state in a body bag.
But the 67-year-old rabbi from Queens is not easily put off, and he went ahead with his trip. Accompanied by armed bodyguards, he accomplished the goal that sparked the death threat. Morgenstern annulled 44 Jewish marriages during the four days he spent in Israel.”We try to resurrect the marriage, and in some cases we succeed,”said Morgenstern. But when”a marriage is dead, you can’t take a club and force a woman to live with a man she hates,”he added.
Morgenstern’s concern for women stuck in dead-end marriages has elicited strong reactions within the Orthodox Jewish world in which he lives. The death threat, the source of which remains unknown, attests to the depth of opposition to his efforts.
His concern has prompted him to create a rabbinic court _ a”bet din”in Hebrew _ to”free”women whose estranged husbands refuse to grant them formal Jewish religious divorces despite the breakdown of their relationship. It does so primarily by finding grounds that enable it to annul the problematic marriages.
Under Jewish divorce law, only the husband can formally issue a”get,”or Jewish bill of divorce. However, some Orthodox men withhold a get from their wives in an attempt to force them to cede financial resources or custody of the couple’s children. Sometimes, they do it out of sheer vindictiveness.
These women are known in Hebrew as”agunot,”or”chained women,”whose legal ties to dead marriages prohibit them from remarrying. The problem is confined to the Orthodox Jewish community, whose members adhere closest to traditional Jewish law.
There are 2,000 to 3,000 agunot in the United States and thousands more in Israel and elsewhere, according to Agunah Inc., a Brooklyn-based advocacy organization. In Hebrew, agunah is singular for agunot.
In recent years, the agunot problem has become a leading issue in Orthodox Jewish circles. Some Orthodox women have made it their primary issue and have gained the attention and support of prominent male Orthodox leaders, such as Morgenstern.”For sheer torment, there are few instruments of coercion more effective”than withholding a get, said Honey Rackman, Agunah Inc. co-director.
In addition to the 44 Israeli cases, Morgenstern’s rabbinic court has in the past year ended through annulment 75 of the 100 divorce cases it has heard in the United States. In the remaining cases, the court either decided that annulment was inappropriate, convinced the husband to grant a get or was able to reconcile the couple.
Morgenstern runs the court with Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, chancellor of Israel’s Bar Ilan University, and Rabbi Moshe Antelman, a rabbi in Rehovot, Israel. Emanuel Rackman is Honey Rackman’s father-in-law.
The court’s actions have been denounced by the leaders of almost every major Orthodox organization. The critics say that while the three rabbis may have good intentions, their methods conflict with traditional Jewish law.”Our sages teach that misapplied compassion can lead to cruelty,”said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice president of the National Council of Young Israel, which represents about 200 so-called”modern”(moderate) Orthodox synagogues in the United States, Canada and Israel.”How heartless and foolish it is to lull unfortunate women into the illusory impression that they are free to remarry when virtually every major rabbinic body in the world has rejected the approach used,”he said.
Morgenstern said one of the cases he heard in Israel involved a woman whose husband left her 29 years ago. The man converted to Islam and demanded custody of their children in return for a get.
She refused and had been an agunah until Morgenstern freed her.”If you kill someone, you spend 25 years in prison and then you are paroled,”Morgenstern said.”This woman was in prison 29 years.” Jewish law permits annulments if it can be proved that the husband had a condition that would have disuaded the woman from marrying him had she known about it prior to the wedding.
The new court has expanded the list of conditions by arguing that spousal abuse, drug use and adultery, among other things, are intrinsic to a personality and, therefore, should fall under the criteria for annulment.
In addition, the court uses one of about 30 technical loopholes to declare the original wedding ceremony invalid, and a get therefore unnecessary. For instance, the court may rule that the witnesses at the wedding did not conform to the rigorous criteria listed in the Talmud, the authoritative body of Jewish law. Or it may conclude that the proper consent from the bride was lacking or that a rabbi made some procedural error during the course of the wedding ceremony.
Morgenstern _ who was ordained by the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a titan of 20th-century Orthodox scholarship _ said he reviews his annulment decisions with respected Orthodox rabbis in Israel, and they have approved of his actions.”The women have been terrorized, number one by the husbands and number two by the rabbis,”he said.”This is a million percent Orthodox, regardless of what (critics) say. We’re willing to take them on.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
He has had to do just that in recent weeks, as word of the new bet din has spread. Condemnation of the new court has been loud and vehement from the Orthodox world.
Rabbi Michael Broyde, director of the Beth Din of America _ a religious court affiliated with the modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America _ said that a marriage may only be annulled when the women entered it under a mistaken premise that could have been discovered at the time of the wedding. He dismissed the expansion of annulment grounds accepted by Morgenstern’s court.”Abandonment (or cruelty, addiction, etc.) which takes place after the wedding cannot possibly be grounds to annul the marriage,”Broyde said in a written statement.
Rabbi Avi Shafran, spokesman for the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, said that a community should try to convince a recalcitrant husband to give his wife a get by shunning him.
But many Orthodox communities already take that approach by not allowing a man in this category to pray in their synagogues. However, should that tactic fail, there is little other hope for agunot.”Just because there isn’t an easy way out, that doesn’t mean that you can create a new way out that doesn’t jive with”halacha”(Jewish law),”Shafran said.
But Rabbi Saul Berman, director of Edah, a modern Orthodox think tank, called for the new court to be adequately funded so it can do thorough investigations and free agunot who are unquestionably eligible.
The Orthodox community must differentiate between”experimental”methods used by the court and those falling”within the range of acceptable tools,”Berman said.”The experimental tools need to be researched, published and advocated before they are enacted,”he said, adding that the court’s decisions should be judged on a case-by-case basis.
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If the decisions of the new court are not broadly accepted, many Orthodox rabbis are likely to decline to perform new marriages for”freed”agunot, claiming the women are still technically married. When freed agunot do find rabbis to perform their weddings, others may still not recognize the union and consider the new couple’s children illegitimate.”They owe it to their future kids not to do this,”Lerner said of agunot.
But to activists on the issue, those considerations are secondary to freeing agunot from the emotional bondage in which they find themselves.”They really don’t understand a woman’s pain,”Susan Aranoff, who also co-directs Agunah Inc., said of the court’s opponents.”They don’t know what it is like to see their childbearing years slip away.” Morgenstern said he tells agunot that he will find rabbis to perform their weddings and those of any children they may have.
The court’s supporters say it will gain acceptance in the Orthodox world as the number of freed agunot reaches into the hundreds.
Rabbi Rackman said he has for years been unsuccessfully urging his fellow rabbis to act on the issue. But the 88-year-old former president of the Rabbinical Council of America is confident the court will prevail eventually.”It’s a cause whose time has come,”he said.”The human condition requires they do something heroic on behalf of women in trouble because of halacha.”
IR END KRESS
