A woman gestures at a Jerusalem demonstration to help agunot / Haaretz We’re familiar with the stories of recalcitrant husbands who refuse to give their wives a get, a religious writ of divorce, effectively preventing them from remarrying. But less discussed is the heart-wrenching experience of women whose husbands are alive, but unable to interact…
Bobby and Chelle Medow are happily married — and have been for almost 50 years. Yet one Sunday evening in January, the St. Louis couple made contingency plans for a divorce. And 31 other Orthodox married couples joined them. They are part of a small but budding movement that is being promoted by some Orthodox…
A new independent rabbinical court to address the issue of agunot, so-called “chained women” whose husbands refuse to give them a religious writ of divorce, will be launched next year. The announcement of the court, or beit din, was made Sunday at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conference in New York. Rabbi Simcha Krauss of…
(JTA) — The websites look like those of political prisoners. Under the caption “Free Tamar Now!” there is a close-up photo of demonstrators with signs and megaphones. “Stop the abuse,” one sign reads. But FreeTamar.org and the Free Gital Facebook group seek emancipation not from literal bars or chains. Rather, they seek liberation for agunot…
More than two-dozen people protested last week in Norwalk, Connecticut against a Jewish husband, who refused to grant his wife a divorce, the Jewish Ledger reports. The demonstration, organized by the non-profit Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), took place outside the hospital where the husband, Ephraim Ohana, works. Ohana is refusing to grant…
I cannot fathom the idea of working on a problem for 40 years. And yet, there is a whole group of Jewish women — and a handful of men — who have been doing just that. These are the agunah activists, some of whom have been fighting to find solutions for agunot — women trapped…
Fraidy Reiss was married at the age of 19 to a man she despised. Outwardly, she had a choice. The ultra-Orthodox matchmaker she went to gave her two men to choose from. She went on a couple of dates. She desired neither. But as a girl perilously close to 20 in the Hasidic community of…
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