No sex this Shabbat: Orthodox influencer sparks strike to highlight plight of chained woman
Adina Sash, second from left, at a protest calling on Volvy Berkowitz to give his wife, Malky, a Jewish divorce. Courtesy of Adina Sash
By Louis Keene March 7, 2024
To pressure Orthodox men into granting their wives a Jewish divorce, activists have picketed outside their homes, marched through their synagogues and buffeted their rabbis with letters and phone calls.
Now, a prominent influencer is targeting their bedrooms, with a call to Orthodox women to withhold sex from their husbands.
Adina Sash, known as Flatbush Girl by her 68,000 followers on Instagram, is calling it a “Mikvah Strike,” a play on the Orthodox rules requiring women to immerse in a mikvah, or ritual bath, between finishing their periods and having sex.
“We know that Friday night, Shabbos, is mitzvah night,” Sash said in an Instagram story Wednesday, referring to the tradition of fulfilling the commandment of marital intimacy on Shabbat. “Please call your husband and tell him: I’m sorry. I am closed for business this Shabbos. If you want to have relations with me, please figure out a way to help free Malky.”
Malky is Malky (Gold) Berkowitz, a woman from the Hasidic enclave of Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. She has been trying for more than four years to divorce her husband, but he has refused to release her from the marriage by granting a get, or Jewish divorce. A woman trapped in such a marriage is referred to as an agunah, meaning “chained woman” (the plural is agunot).
Berkowitz did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Sash declined to say whether she had consulted Berkowitz about the strike, noting that if Berkowitz endorsed it, it could detract from her cause, and if she rejected it, it would defang the effort.
Sash, who has been championing Berkowitz’s case for months, told me that more than 800 women had committed to joining the sex boycott. But her campaign also met some resistance — and panic.
In the first 24 hours after Sash’s story, there were countless social media posts and at least one “emergency podcast” about the Mikvah Strike. Some saw it as an ingenious way for Orthodox women to seize their agency. Others deemed it a pointless threat to marital order.
“We’ve encountered a lot of resistance in this battle because a lot of the people who care most passionately about it are women,” said Sash, who is 36. “Unfortunately, the system that’s holding Malky hostage thinks that women are just hormonal hysterics. So this is our way of recruiting and asking for more male participation.”
Efforts to track the number of agunot have long been stymied by community insularity and stigma. One 2011 study put the number at 462 in the U.S. in the previous five years. Advocates for Orthodox women say that the looming threat of withholding a get leads many wives to stay in bad or even abusive marriages.
The Orthodox world has devised a tool to preempt the agunah problem called the “halachic prenup,” an agreement in which both spouses promise to abide by the decision of a Jewish court if either party seeks a divorce. But despite widespread endorsement from Orthodox rabbis, experts say use of the prenup is rare in the Hasidic world.
To free Berkowitz, who is 29, Sash has previously hired a plane to fly a “Free Malky” banner over Kiryas Joel, produced a video describing the woman’s plight that had received 200,000 views; and led protesters into the synagogue of the man denying the divorce, Volvy Berkowitz.
None of these things have worked. Sash said she heard Mikvah Strikes had helped free agunot in other communities. Hers, though, is the first to be so public.
“More than I tried to think about what’s going to have mass appeal, I thought about what’s going to work to free her,” she said.
Some of the backlash against her idea came from women — including from one divorced mother, Emma Polansky, who said she had once “begged” for her own get.
“We need to have a change, and we all need to speak up, and we all as a community need to do better,” Polansky said on Instagram in a video later shared on X. “But I don’t agree with the execution of this. To throw a wrench into marriages — marriages that are potentially struggling, marriages of people that are newly married or on the brink of divorce, or struggling to have children — I can’t stand behind a movement risking hundreds of relationships.”
"We as a community are not doing enough for the Agunah's, and we need to do more…but as someone who waited for my Get, begged for my Get, prayed for my Get…this (Intimacy strike) is not the correct way." pic.twitter.com/lQZiUwjiby
— Frum TikTok (@FrumTikTok) March 7, 2024
Meanwhile, the hosts of Mislaibeled, a podcast on Orthodox culture that often veers into discussion of how women should behave, convened Thursday on Instagram Live to discuss the Mikvah Strike. But when their guest, a woman named Abbey Pollock, revealed that she herself was an agunah, one of the hosts, Laibel Weiner, lashed out at her. “You’ve lost all credibility for why you’re an agunah, straight up,” he said. “I’ll say it right here: I would not trust you for one second as far as your case.”
Weiner said he would pressure any man who denied his wife a get — but not innocent bystanders in the community. “In what healthy world should a random person be affected who does nothing wrong,” he asked, “because you want someone else to push for your cause?”
Pollock responded: “If your wife wants to withhold sex for one night so that you can understand and empathize what an agunah deals with, that’s her choice,” Pollock said. “If you think she’s hurting you and punishing you, then take it up with your therapist. But that’s not what Adina is asking for.”
For her part, Sash said that if a woman was worried that withholding sex from her husband for one night would throw their relationship in jeopardy, it was likely already there.
She said she was preparing an FAQ to share with women interested in joining the strike, and that she took no joy in watching Orthodox men squirm at the prospect of going without sex.
On the contrary, she said, she was disheartened by the “retaliatory language” — implying they would divorce their wives were they to strike — that some men had used in response.
“We peacefully asked men to partake in these kinds of things for forever,” she said. “It’s not a secret that when you go to an agunah protest, or you talk about agunahs in general, that a majority of the demographics are female. So it saddens me that now that we are saying something that affects men in order to create dialogue, the dialogue is focused more on how it’s going to hurt the men and how it’s not fair to men.”
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