Independent Rabbinical Court Addressing Agunot To Be Launched Next Year
Image by Thinkstock
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 Jerusalem will head the court, which will have no institutional affiliation and begin operating in New York.
Krauss, a leading Modern Orthodox rabbi and widely respected scholar, told JTA that the court will utilize little-used, obscure resources in Jewish religious law to free agunot, including the excommunication from communal prayer of their husbands and Sephardic laws that allow for greater initiative from women in divorce cases. Krauss said he will leave “no door unopened” in his quest to address the plight of agunot. Eventually, Krauss said, he wants to open an affiliate court in Israel. He also is working on attaining approval from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is necessary if the court’s judgments are to be upheld under Israeli law.
“The goal of this project is to humanize the beit din,” Krauss told JTA. “You can’t solve these situations with sleight of hand. But hopefully we can use the right methodology, so that even these situations get solved.”
Krauss acknowledged that the biggest challenge facing any avowedly independent religious court is mainstream acceptance, particularly within the haredi Orthodox communities.
“Nobody wants agunot,” he said. “So hopefully, if [haredim] see that we are solving these cases, maybe they will come to us. Or maybe they will follow.”
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
