‘Chained’ Women Are Usually Young: Study
Most agunot, or so-called ‘chained’ women whose husbands refuse to grant a divorce, are younger woman with children who are trying to leave a first marriage, according to a new study.
The findings, which identified 462 instances of agunah over a five-year period, suggest that there has been an increase in cases of Jewish women being refused a religious divorce, or get, by their husbands while the rate of case resolution has been on the decline. These “chained women” have little money and are not aware of the resources available to them.
More than 70 community-based and social service-related organizations across North America were polled in the census released earlier this month. The study was spearheaded by Barbara Zakheim, founder of the Greater Washington Jewish Coalition, and polling was conducted pro bono by the Mellman Group.
Exacerbating the problem, the study says, is that there is no one specific communal body or rabbinical court that deals with the issue. The report also found that the husbands will sometimes apply pressure on the agunot, forcing them to make financial or child-custody sacrifices in return for receiving a get.
There is still no Orthodox systemic solution to freeing agunot from the chains binding them to a Jewish marriage,” Zakheim said. “While some rabbis have taken a commendable proactive role in supporting agunot, many others have exhibited an apparent lack of compassion, reflected in their deafening silence on this issue. It is totally unacceptable when rabbis tell agunot to pay off their husbands to receive a get, or when careless beit din [rabbinical court] verdicts leave women in serious financial straits.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
