Two Orthodox rabbis and two others were arrested for allegedly kidnapping and beating men in order to force them to grant their wives religious Jewish divorces. The men were arrested Wednesday night in a monthlong sting operation in which a female FBI agent posed as an Orthodox woman trying to get a religious divorce, or…
Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State: Israel’s Civil War By Susan M. Weiss and Netty C. Gross-Horowitz Brandeis University Press, 240 pages, $40 Until modern times, an agunah, a “chained” or “anchored” woman, was usually a wife whose husband had been lost at sea or killed on the battlefield; rabbis wrote circles around the…
When your marriage hits splitsville, it’s perfectly understandable to need a friendly shoulder to cry on. For Michael Douglas, who recently announced his split with actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, that shoulder belongs to 83-year-old billionaire George Soros. Douglas and Zeta-Jones, together since 1999, announced in August that they were — to quote “Friends” — “on a…
A man imprisoned for refusing to grant his wife a divorce was transferred to a facility with harsher conditions, after the head of the rabbinical court asked prison officials to do so, in order to induce him to agree to a divorce. In September, 2012, S.A., a young, married father of four, was sent to…
If you’ve ever watched MTV Cribs, you know that all musicians like to show off their odd rock memorabilia — but Black Keys singer Dan Auerbach just parted with what could be the weirdest one yet. According to court documents obtained by TMZ, Auerbach’s divorce settlement includes giving his ex-wife a cool $5 million —…
Israel’s rabbinical establishment has responded to a worrying survey pointing to the widespread extortion by husbands whose wives want divorces. And instead of moving to stop the phenomenon, it has simply attacked the survey — conducted by one of Israel’s largest polling firms commissioned by a major university. For Israel’s Jewish population, all marriage-related matters…
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…
Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson and multi-millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi confirmed on Monday they were getting divorced, a month after a newspaper published photographs of him with his hands around her throat outside a London restaurant. The photos showed Lawson, hugely popular in Britain for her television cooking shows, in tears and brought Saatchi, a…
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