[00:00:00] Leah Sarna: Welcome to Getting Free. This is episode 2. Before we start, just a warning that in this episode we’ll be talking about abuse and domestic violence. Please listen with care.

[00:00:13] Getting a divorce is never fun. It’s rarely easy. It can take a long time.. But despite all of that, a divorce is meant to be an ending. It puts a bookend on the relationship and allows everyone to move on. 

And ideally, that’s what the Gett is supposed to do, too. It’s a religious ritual where the Jewish marriage is undone, and a husband tells his wife, you are free. 

Julia, from episode 1, the woman whose husband spied on her with a hidden camera, knows how the Gett process is supposed to work.  because she’s been through it before. 

[00:00:52]  Julia:  Okay. That was very different

[00:00:56] Leah Sarna: It was many years earlier.. she had split up with her first husband. 

[00:01:00] Julia: You know, we were legally married in the United States, you know, and I got my civil divorce. 

[00:01:06] Leah Sarna: At the time, Julia wasn’t particularly observant. She didn’t even think about going through the gett process. 

[00:01:12] Julia: And then when my son started to get religious, he said to me, you know, mom, you really need to get a gett. And I said, okay. And I called the local rabbi who did that, and he said, okay, well I need to talk to your ex. So I called my ex and my ex said, sure, as long as it doesn’t cost me anything, I said, okay, I’ll pay for it. 

[00:01:37] Leah Sarna: So Julia and her ex-husband went in front of the Jewish court- it’s called a Beit Din– and they exist all over the world.

Together they walked into a small room with a table where the court’s three judges were sitting. A scribe sat on the side of the room. The ritual began.

[00:01:56] Leah Sarna:  The scribe handed paper, ink and a pen to Julia’s ex. He handed them back, saying, “I give you this paper ink, and pen and all the writing material, and I instruct you to write for me a gett to divorce my wife.”

The scribe began to write. The process, hand lettering 12 lines of aramaic, took over an hour.  When the gett was complete, a judge turned to Julia and her ex-husband. To the husband he asked “Do you give this gett of your own free will?” I do he replied. 

The judge turned to Julia. “Do you accept this gett of your own free will?” he asked. I do, she replied. Then, the judge told Julia to remove her jewelry.  She rose and stood before the men. 

She lifted her hands, held them together, and turned her palms upwards. The scribe took the gett, expertly folded it in the special way that a gett is folded, and handed it to the rabbi. The rabbi handed it to her ex-husband. He raised it up, and dropped it into Julia’s hands.

[00:03:43] Julia: When I stood in front of the men and they handed me the gett I actually felt something ripped from my body and tossed away, and I knew that even though I didn’t think I felt like I was attached to my first husband,I was. There were spiritual strings there. I was like, I mean, it was a physical sensation of something just flying outta my body and into the universe.

[00:04:42] Leah Sarna: That feeling is what we want for all Jewish women.. To get that piece of paper that makes them free, in every sense of the word. 

But, when you’re trying to leave an abusive relationship, there is no release – the difficult process towards a gett just feels like a trap. 

I’m  Rabbanit Leah Sarna, and from the International Beit Din, this is Getting Free.

[00:05:41] Leah Sarna: The women you’ve heard from so far have lived through abusive marriages, and they’ve finally escaped. Now they have to get divorced in the eyes of civil and Jewish law. 

To do that in Jewish law, they need – a gett, Until they have one, they’re called “chained women” or a Agunah. They are “chained” to dead marriages.

When people first hear about these women, they often ask, why don’t they just leave? Why does it matter if they’re religiously divorced or not? And that is not an easy question to answer

The simple explanation  is that this is a matter of tradition. For Orthodox Jews who follow Jewish law, called Halakha, it is a religious requirement, a part of their faith. But even for Jews who don’t follow religious law, it can just be an important tradition in their community. Here’s Rabbi Barry Dolinger, the executive director of the International Beit Din- 

[00:06:35] Barry Dolinger:  And so many, many people, well beyond the number of people that strictly adhere to Jewish law, need a religious divorce.

There are whole hosts of people who have varying levels of observance, but their families are very traditional, and they want their divorce to be fully recognized and accepted within their family. Ditto for communities.

[00:06:56] Leah Sarna: There’s also the practical consequences of not having your gett. In Israel, if you don’t have a gett, you’re still legally married. You can’t remarry anyone without it.  

[00:07:06] Barry Dolinger: many, many Jews have open and complex interactions with the state of Israel. They may be citizens of the United States or Canada, but were born in Israel and are Israeli citizen, they may always be wondering if they will need to go to Israel due to rising antisemitism globally and at home, they may be dating Israelis, and perhaps the wedding needs to be there.

And so if in the state of Israel you want to be able to, to freely marry, you need to be divorced according to religious law.

[00:07:37] Leah Sarna: Let’s say you do remarry without a Gett. In Israel, and in many Jewish communities, that marriage isn’t real-  you’re actually committing adultery. And any children you have together are illegitimate. 

In Hebrew, those children are called “Mamzerim.” It’s an actual legal status in Israel and in Jewish law.  Those children are only allowed to marry other Mamzerim.  And this status isn’t just for them, it’s passed down through the generations. 

That was a concern for Helen:

[00:08:14] Helen: You know, because, if I were to get married and have kids,when I didn’t have my gett then those would be considered illegitimate children. So I, they wouldn’t really be accepted in the Jewish community. Right. They wouldn’t be able to marry other Jewish people. So that’s a big, big problem.

[00:08:28] Leah Sarna: But maybe the biggest reason to get a gett, is because of what it means to the women. Here’s Julia again-

[00:08:34] Julia: My secular friends were- “Why does this matter so much to you? It’s no big deal. He’s outta your life. Just forget about it.” And I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.  They didn’t get what it does to you inside. It’s actually very hard to explain.

[00:08:56] Leah Sarna: Julia was a grandparent when she left her second husband, and she didn’t care about getting remarried. The Gett was about something deeper. 

[00:09:04] Julia:  Because without a gett, I still felt tied to him. There’s a feeling. That I had inside, that he was still a part of my life, that he was still controlling me, and that’s what he was trying to do our whole time together was control me so I would behave the way he wanted me to behave, which is not who I am.

I just could not live with that. I felt like I couldn’t heal from all this. And I don’t think that many people understand that. It’s not paperwork. It’s deep in the soul.

[00:09:56] Leah Sarna: Alla puts it this way:

[00:09:58] Alla: It was incredibly important to me. I got married under a chuppah. I got married with an Orthodox rabbi. So of course that marriage is over, I want to dissolve it in the appropriate way.

You make promises in front of God, in front of your entire family. What could be more holy than that? What could be more honorable than that? So the dissolution in my mind has to be fully done because in the eyes of God and I do believe in God, we would still be married. And why would I still wanna be married to an abuser or someone who harmed myself and our children?

[00:10:40] Leah Sarna: The women we work with can wait years or even decades to receive their Gett— but that’s because their husbands are trying to delay the process.  How is all of this supposed to work?  It turns out, it‘s confusing for a lot of people.

[00:10:57] Zachary Truboff:  The Jewish community as a whole understands very little about the Jewish divorce process.

[00:11:01] Leah Sarna: That’s  Rabbi Zachary Truboff, He’s the Director of our Institute for Agunah Research and Education. 

[00:11:07] Zachary Truboff:  If you wanna know about any other Jewish ritual topic, you can basically type the ritual into Amazon. You’ll find, you know, dozens if not hundreds of books on the topic. Divorce is not one of them, and that’s probably due to the fact that religious communities don’t tend to look at divorce as something positive. They don’t want to talk about it. 

[00:11:24] Leah Sarna: So, Rabbi Truboff is writing A Guide to Jewish Divorce to make the process more understandable for everyone.  

[00:11:30] Zachary Truboff:  The holiness of a marriage is not just dependent on how it starts and what goes on during it, but also how it ends. And if it doesn’t end in a way that can respect the dignity of both parties, that impugns the nature of marriage itself and the holiness that it’s supposed to have.

[00:11:47] Leah Sarna: The confusion around Jewish divorce runs deep. The community doesn’t even agree on when you’re supposed to start the process. Some Jewish courts say you should handle the Gett first, before you even start a civil divorce. That way, husbands can’t use the Gett as a way to negotiate better deals around custody, finances, or anything else. But a lot of Rabbis say, go for the civil divorce first. That’s what Amit did. 

[00:12:13] Amit:  So when we separated in March of 2023, I didn’t instantly ask for my gett, because it was like we were just separating. That wasn’t at the forefront. I was thinking of how am I putting food on the table? How am I, you know, taking care of my children, how am I just like getting by?

[00:12:36] Leah Sarna: Amit used the civil courts to try to get basic agreements, like access to financial support and her home. Her husband used the process to stall. 

[00:12:45] Amit: So anytime we would be close to a hearing instead of showing up to the hearing, ’cause he knew that it wouldn’t work in his favor, we’d get into some sort of deal the night before, two nights before.  But meanwhile the attorney is being paid a ton of money, did all the work to prepare for the hearing, and then we get into an agreement.

[00:13:03] Leah Sarna: During this time, her husband was giving conflicting messages 

[00:13:07] Amit:  It just depends on who he speaks to, like what he’s gonna say either to the rabbis. He says, of course I’m planning on giving the gett after the civil is done. but then to people in the community, like, no, I’m never gonna give the gett.

[00:13:21] Leah Sarna: I want to take a moment here and point out that Amit’s husband is doing everything he can to keep her in this marriage, to continue to control her. The Gett is one tool, but the civil divorce process is another. It’s another way to stall, to delay, and keep her in this dangerous limbo.  

[00:13:43] Leah Sarna: While she was waiting to figure out the civil divorce, Amit agreed to live in the same house as her husband, just at different times, so the kids didn’t have to move around. He used this as another tool…

[00:13:55] Amit: He would just do things that were just tormenting me, like leaving the house a complete mess and taking things that were mine.  And it got so extreme to the point where my front doors were super glued and he even admitted that in a deposition and I couldn’t get access to my house.  The cops were at our house almost every day.

[00:14:23] Leah Sarna:The harassment continued for months. 

[00:14:26] Amit: I was just like, oh my gosh, what did I get myself into? It’s no wonder women choose not to get a divorce because they’re like, oh well anyways, I’m not gonna get my gett, and anyways, I’m gonna be tortured for years through civil court and in Beis Din why would I even go down that route?

 So I’d rather live with a roommate and just live in this, you know, isolated, abusive situation as opposed to choosing happiness and choosing to create a better life for oneself. 

[00:15:00] Leah Sarna:  We see this a lot. Controlling husbands don’t just deny their wives a Gett, they do whatever they can to make the divorce process as difficult as possible- they send threats, spread rumors, or get violent. Abusive husbands who aren’t Jewish do this too.

 In that way, the Gett process is helpful-  when a husband won’t participate, it’s a signal that other harassment is happening below the surface. 

[00:15:28] Ruth Little:  The gett is a great signifier of abuse.

[00:15:32] Leah Sarna:  Ruth Little is making a documentary about Helen’s experience. 

[00:15:36] Ruth Little:   I mean if somebody is refusing to give a gett, there is a problem. And you can see that very clearly. 

[00:15:43] Leah Sarna: Ruth also went through an abusive divorce, but she’s not Jewish. She says, at least there are conferences and organizations devoted to helping Jewish women in this situation.

[00:15:55] Ruth Little: To look at these problems and to look to care about women and to discuss post-separation abuse and coercive control is incredible. And out there in family court and in the civil world, this is not happening. 

[00:16:15] Leah Sarna: But let’s get back to the Gett. When the divorce is mutual, in ideal circumstances, the process can be done in an afternoon. And It looks like what Julia experienced with her first husband. 

The husband and wife go in front of a Jewish Court, made up of three judges –  typically Rabbis. They’re called dayanim.  The couple agree that they’re there of their own free will. Then a scribe writes out the Gett.  The husband hands it to the wife, and the wife walks away with it. Just symbolically, down the hall. Then she brings it back to the Rabbi. And they’re religiously divorced! The whole thing takes 2-3 hours. 

It’s when husbands don’t want to participate that it gets complicated.

[00:16:58] Zachary Truboff: The largest misconception assumes that Jewish divorce is about waiting to see if the husband is willing to give the gett right? That, it just stems from whether or not the husband is willing and wants to do this

[00:17:10] Leah Sarna: The truth is, a woman can go to a religious court and say I want a divorce. 

[00:17:15] Zachary Truboff: The Beit Din, the Rabbinical courts, it’s really their job, first and foremost, to determine if a marriage has to come to an end.

[00:17:23] Leah Sarna: The way they decide this is pretty simple. Has the couple stopped sharing a home? Have they been living separate lives for the past year or eighteen months? If so, then the marriage is over. 

[00:17:35] Zachary Truboff: The Beit Din has to evaluate the situation, and can come to a ruling, okay- the husband has to give the Gett.

[00:17:40] Leah Sarna: Even just a hundred, two hundred years ago, these courts—One is called a Beit Din, if there’s more than one, we call them Batei Din— They existed in independent Jewish communities, and they had more power. If they decided that a marriage was over, and a man refused to give his wife the gett, there were concrete consequences – like- they could have him beaten up.  

[00:18:04] Zachary Truboff:  Today, that’s obviously not a possibility. 

[00:18:07] Leah Sarna: And now, there’s a lot of disagreement about the kind of power these courts—these Batei Din DO have. Most judges–  the dayanim… they don’t even know. 

[00:18:17] Zachary Truboff:  It is far too often the case that the rabbis, the dayanim  that serve on Batei Din do not necessarily have the level of knowledge and expertise that they are supposed to.

 In America there’s no standardized curriculum to be a dayan. There’s no standardized set of knowledge that one can expect a dayan to know. And it’s extraordinarily rare that dayanim in America are fluent with contemporary responsa, on issues of divorce. 

[00:18:46] Leah Sarna: It’s an almost impossible situation for women who want to end these abusive marriages.

[00:18:50] Zachary Truboff: And they find themselves running into countless obstacles because they don’t understand how it works. It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and the husbands can use that to manipulate. They can find leverage, and they can really use it to oppress their wives. 

[00:19:08 Leah Sarna: Let’s get back to Amit, who’s trying to navigate this maze. When she got fed up with her husband’s stalling techniques, she finally asked a Beit Din to help her with the Gett process. 

They told her they’d send her husband three letters summoning him to a hearing and then another warning. The first letter went out.

[00:19:26] Amit:  And he didn’t respond. 

[00:19:28] Leah Sarna:The second letter went out.

[00:19:29] Amit:  He said, oh, I only want this rabbi to deal with like the gett issue. 

[00:19:35] Leah Sarna:That Rabbi had been their marriage counselor–right before everything fell apart. Amit thought it was a conflict of interest. But she wanted to get this done. So she said, fine. We’ll work with him. It felt like she was finally getting close…

[00:19:53] Amit:  And we’re just chasing this particular rabbi and he’s not responding, not answering calls, not emailing.

[00:20:00] Leah Sarna: This went on for about four months.

[00:20:04] Amit: And he said eventually after months of chasing him, which was just another delay tactic, he said, I’m not interested in participating. So then we turn back to my ex and say, “Okay, he’s not interested. Where else do you wanna go?” He said, “I’m only interested in going to him.” And he wasn’t participating in any other capacity or offering any other solution.

[00:20:33] Leah Sarna: Amit’s husband was trying to sit out the process. Other husbands stall by overwhelming the women with lawsuits. That’s what happened to Helen. She thinks her ex filed about 27 cases against her.

[00:20:50] Helen:  He challenged the restraining order in the US Federal Court. We had two California Supreme Court cases, two second district appellate cases, one or two ninth district appellate, like six federal cases. Like there were just mountains of cases. 

[00:21:04] Leah Sarna: This litigation abuse even extended to people who were helping her. 

[00:21:08] Helen: He tried to get a restraining order against the main rabbi of the Beit Din. And then when that didn’t work, he sued all of the rabbis from that Beit Din in federal court alleging that they did religious hate crimes to him. 

[00:21:22] Leah Sarna: Sometimes husbands skip the stalling process– legal or otherwise— and go straight to extortion. That’s what Melissa’s ex did… 

[00:21:30] Melissa: He said I’ll give the gett, but it has to be on my terms. And then the next day he called a meeting with the rabbi, and my parents and myself. And at this point we already had a really bad feeling about it. But, we agreed and we went to the meeting.

[00:21:47] Leah Sarna: They sat down. 

[00:21:48] Melissa: So at the meeting he said, I will give Melissa a gett if you, my parents, If you buy me a mortgage-free home in this town. And everyone was just kind of like silent and shocked.

And then my mother, my father asked like, you mean like, um, for like an apartment to rent? And he’s like, no. And it became clear he meant a mortgage free home. And he said, I’ll give you the gett and move out of the house if you do that.

[00:22:24] Leah Sarna: He said it had to be in the town where they lived, where the average home cost more than $800,000.

[00:22:30] Melissa: Everyone was like kind of shocked and the rabbi said like, okay, um, this meeting is over because there was nothing like we just saw that there was nothing to do at that point.

[00:22:46] Leah Sarna: Unfortunately, moves like this are pretty common. 

[00:22:50] Joseph Weiler: In the negotiations over the divorce, the husband says, unless you pay me a hundred thousand dollars, I won’t divorce you. Or unless we divide the property in this way, I won’t divorce you. Or disputes about custody of the children, visitation rights, et cetera.

[00:23:05] Leah Sarna: That’s Joseph Weiler- he is a law professor at the NYU School of Law and one of the founders of the International Beit Din. He says this extortion happens in a lot of Jewish divorces.

[00:23:16] Joseph Weiler: We did an empirical research in Israel. And I can’t imagine that it would be all that different in the United States and in at least 30% of divorces there is gett extortion.

[00:23:30] Leah Sarna: A lot of Rabbis have just come to expect this. That’s what happened to Julia.

[00:23:37] Julia: There was one rabbi who was more helpful than the others. And he started a conversation with him and he called me and he said, okay, what he’s saying is if you give him X amount of dollars, which was a very large sum of money, he will give you a gett. 

And this one rabbi said to me, said to me, well, let me raise this money for you. And I said, no, he does not need money. It seems so unfair. There are people who can’t eat. And to raise money to give to somebody who doesn’t need it seemed to me to be. So against Judaism, it really did.

[00:24:23] Leah Sarna: It’s against Jewish law, and it’s against basic Jewish values. But In many ways, it has nothing to do with Judaism. Esther Macner, a tremendously successful advocate for Agunot, and the founder of Get Jewish Divorce Justice, puts it this way-

[00:24:40] Esther Macner: The refusal to grant a religious divorce is not a matter of religion. It’s really all about control. You don’t need to know anything about religion to understand. If someone says, unless you waive your rights to the house, you’re never gonna get your gett. Unless you give me custody. You’re never gonna get the gett or you are gonna go to your grave, you know, without the gett. You don’t have to know what the religion is. It’s simply another tool. 

[00:25:12] Leah Sarna: Esther tries to explain this to the husbands…

I always approach it, I guess, in the same way that you would approach a hostage negotiator. And I explain it to the gett refuser, you know, the real question is, do you want her back? Do you want her in your bed? 

No, of course not. 

[00:25:33] Leah Sarna: And yet, they won’t give the gett. They’re stalling, trying to squeeze out thousands of dollars, or they’ve disappeared entirely.

Why stay married to someone you despise? Why draw out this process for years or even decades? 

On the next episode of Getting Free, we’ll find out, from the men themselves. 

 

[00:26:11] Leah Sarna: You’ve been listening to Getting Free, a podcast from the International Beit Din.

If you or someone you know is being denied a gett, or facing extortion in the Jewish divorce process, reach out to the International Beit Din for Help. To learn more go to internationalbeitdin.org/gettingfree. 

This episode was produced by Megan Hall and Nat Hardy

With sound design and mixing by Nat Hardy

Our theme song is  “Yehei Rava” by Yoni Stokar

Additional music in this episode by BlueDot Sessions