[00:00:00] Leah Sarna: Welcome to Getting Free. This is episode 4. Before we start, just a warning that in this episode we’ll be talking about abuse and domestic violence. Please listen with care.

There’s a moment that arrives for every woman who comes to the International Beit Din.

[00:00:20] Shaindy Urman: the most dangerous time for a person in an abusive relationship

[00:00:24] Zach Truboff: one of the most vulnerable times.

[00:00:26] Esther Macner: The most dangerous time for a woman

[00:00:29] Leah Sarna: It’s the moment she decides to leave.

[00:00:34] Alla: It was December 1st. I’ll never, never forget this.

[00:00:37] Leah Sarna: This is Alla, the lawyer you met at the start of the podcast. Alla was driving home from a party. Her husband, who had been drinking, was in the passenger seat. Her baby was in the back seat, just behind him.

[00:00:51] Alla: We were on the turnpike in New Jersey and it was Saturday night, it was pretty late at night, like probably 11:30ish.

[00:00:58] Leah Sarna: They were in the middle of a fight.

[00:00:59] Alla: And I was driving and he kept screaming to pull over on the road and for me to get out, he was gonna drive away with my 11 month old in the backseat. And I was saying, no, we’re almost home. And he kept screaming how much he hates me, how much he hates my family. He wants a divorce. Like, you know, the, the, the whole speech that he loved, he, because he thought it would be so upsetting to me.

And so I would say no. Like I am not pulling over.

[00:01:25]  Alla: So he grabbed the wheel from the passenger side and he swerved across lanes without looking. I mean, Hashem definitely was protecting us that day.

[00:01:39] Leah Sarna: They pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. Cars were racing past them.

[00:01:45] Alla: And so he got out and he starts hitting the back of the seat. So he literally like hitting the car seat. So I’m like begging him to stop and he’s screaming, get the F out of the car. Get the F out of the car. I’m gonna drive. I’m leaving you here.

And then, I don’t know, it’s the nice girl in me, I said to him, get in the car, we’re gonna go home, and he is continuing his rant with the hitting of the back of the seat. And then, he closes the car door and just breaks my side mirror,  like with all force. And so I drove off. I was like I was shaking.

[00:02:30] Leah Sarna: Alla didn’t know where to go.. So she went to the police station to file a report.

[00:02:36] Alla: And I remember driving there thinking like, oh my God, this makes everything so final, so real.

[00:02:42] Leah Sarna: She pulled into the station. But she didn’t get out of her car.  She just called the police from the parking lot and explained what happened.

[00:02:49] Alla: And I told the officer and he said, please come in, please don’t drive away.

[00:02:53] Leah Sarna: Alla went into the station, and filled out the report. She had a pen in one hand, and her baby in the other.

She got a restraining order for her husband. An officer followed her back to her house, where she packed up her son’s things. And then she drove to New York, to live with her parents.

While she was there, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was always her husband, or her mother in law, telling her to come back.

[00:03:22]  Alla: Everyone’s like blaming me. Like, blahblahblah, your fault, it’s a new family, a new baby. You gotta give it time. You gotta give it that.

[00:03:31] Leah Sarna: And her parents? They agreed.

[00:03:34] Alla: My own parents were saying, you know, in a year this is not gonna matter. It’ll be different. You know, a new baby, everyone’s stressed. I mean like, I’m taking care of him and working full time. Why is everyone stressed? But everyone made me feel really bad.

[00:03:51] Leah Sarna: Her own parents were telling her that this was normal. To be expected.

[00:03:58] Alla: I wish I just stood my ground. But everyone felt bad because I have an 11 months old and divorce is such a stigmatizing thing in our community

[00:04:07] Leah Sarna: A quick note about Alla’s community. She grew up in the Soviet Union, where her family had to hide that they were Jewish.  They didn’t move to the US until 1989– when she was 12.

Because of all of this, Alla says her family is a little more old-fashioned than most Americans. In hindsight, Alla thinks they were trying to protect her. But that’s not what happened.

[00:04:36] Leah Sarna:  So, Alla is living with her parents in their apartment in New York, and everyone is telling her she should forgive her husband and go back to him. Eventually, she agrees to a meeting.

[00:04:46] Alla: And then he was just like laying it on, really thick like, I’m so sorry. You and our son mean the world to me. And I’ll never do it again. I learned my lesson. That’s the one thing I remember him saying. I remember we’re sitting in Panera, across from each other, and he said, I learned my lesson.

You taught me my lesson. You taught me my lesson. And I’ll never forget that, ’cause I remember thinking that I wasn’t trying to teach you a lesson. I was terrified for my son and myself. I was literally terrified of you.

[00:05:19] Leah Sarna: In the end, Alla stayed in the marriage. She moved back in.

It would be 14 more years before Alla left for good. In that time, her husband would get more and more  violent. He hit her. He threw boiling water at her. On three different occasions, he strangled her. And throughout it all, people in her life told her to stay.

When she decided to leave for the final time, her mother told her, “You’re not going to like being divorced.”

[00:06:06] Leah Sarna: The abuse that Alla experienced was extreme. But the response, that she should tough it out, that this will pass–that part is common. So many of the women who come to the international beit din tell us about family members and rabbis, who despite violence, verbal and financial abuse, insist that they make things work.

Not only that, but they support the husband in his gett refusal, expecting or even encouraging extortion and abuse. On this episode of the show, we’re asking why.

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

[00:07:16] Leah Sarna: Many of the women you’ve heard from throughout this podcast have faced resistance from their community when they tried to leave..

Here’s Amit, the mother of 6 kids from Florida. At this point, Amit and her husband had gone to secular court to get divorced. And their local rabbi approved that decision. But then he published a letter to their community.

[00:07:37] Amit: Saying, it makes me so sad that this couple is going through the divorce. It’s making shamayim, the heavens, cry. And he said, it saddens me that this was taken to a secular court.

[00:07:52] Leah Sarna: A lot of people don’t know this, but in the United States, you can use a religious court as a court of arbitration or mediation to settle nearly every facet of a divorce: assets, support, often, even custody.

Anyway, the Rabbi who gave Amit and her husband permission to go to civil court, basically then shamed them for going to civil court.

[00:08:13] Amit: After I saw that letter, ’cause at the end of the day I looked up to this rabbi for so many years and I turned to him when things were hard and rough and I would ask him my halachic questions, I felt a stab to my back.

Because he was technically supposed to be mutual. But this was just an indication that clearly he was choosing a side.

[00:08:34] Leah Sarna: Melissa, whose husband demanded a house in exchange for giving the gett, had a similar experience. At this point, her husband had moved out, so she spoke to a rabbi at a local Beit Din about getting her gett.

[00:08:47] Melissa: And the rabbi told me like, he’s not a bad guy, he’s just sad. And I said, um, rabbi, I think you may have a wrong impression of him.

He was constantly yelling and swearing at me in front of the children and, and then the rabbi said, we all have the potential to be good if we bring it out in them. You just have to act with derekh eretz.

[00:09:10] Leah Sarna: That’s hebrew for “proper behavior.”

[00:09:12] Melissa: And at that point I was just like shocked. I couldn’t believe he said that. And I could see like, okay, this person is not gonna help me.

And I thought, these are the people that we’re supposed to be looking to for guidance that are supposed to be protecting us, and instead they’re protecting the men that are abusers and they’re just continuing the abuse and gaslighting, and they’re enabling it.

[00:09:39] Leah Sarna: This moment with that beit din felt like a betrayal for Melissa. But her local rabbi, who she knew and trusted, and who was a strong advocate for her, recommended that she go there anyway,

[00:09:52] Melissa: He said, because it’s important to maintain the relationship with them. for other cases, which are not, like complicated cases where someone’s going to refuse a gett just so they could have a local beit din and they could arrange for a gett there.

[00:10:05] Leah Sarna: In other words, even though he was pretty sure it would be a bad experience for Melissa, he thought she needed  to go to that beit din anyway, for reasons that weren’t really about her.

This is a challenging dynamic that synagogue rabbis, who have responsibilities to their whole community, often find themselves caught in, even if they are totally sympathetic to the woman in front of them: how do I balance my care for this individual with my obligations to others? I need to be able to work with this local beit din going forward for other divorces and conversions. Will I be able to do that if they know I didn’t trust them with this case?

[00:10:48] Melissa: So it’s like I had to be sacrificed for the greater community.

[00:10:53] Meyer Koplow: Most orthodox rabbis wanna make sure that they are invited to everybody else’s picnic.

[00:11:02] Leah Sarna: This is Meyer Koplow.

[00:11:03] Meyer Koplow:  And that won’t happen if you, you know, if you buck the system.

[00:11:07] Leah Sarna: Meyer is the president of the board of the International Beit DIn. He says, often rabbis are so concerned with their reputations that they put Jewish law, and protecting women, second.

[00:11:18] Meyer Koplow: The system, unfortunately, has gotten skewed in ways that could not possibly have been intended. I don’t want people to take what I say to mean that courts are influenced by money, but most of these courts are attached to an institution. Many of the men who were involved in these cases, are donors to those institutions.Rabbis are not different from the rest of us. They know where, the financial resources lie

[00:11:55] Joesph Weiler: One way of saying it is they’re always looking over their right shoulder.

[00:12:00] Leah Sarna: This is Joseph Weiler, NYU law professor and one of the founders of the International Beit Din.

[00:12:06] Joesph Weiler: I have spoken to countless rabbis who have said to me, we totally agree with what you’re doing in the international beit din. Then I ask them, will you be willing to make that statement in public? And they say, oh no, because you know, what will my other colleague, rabbi say, et cetera. That’s also the human condition.

[00:12:26] Leah Sarna: Some members of the Jewish community think our work –helping women who are chained to dead marriages– is too radical. Despite the halachic texts that overwhelmingly support what we do, the idea that gett refusal is a sign of abuse and a form of abuse, isn’t something everyone gets behind. That can mean it’s risky for rabbis to break out of the status quo.

[00:12:50] Joesph Weiler: I’m respectful of those rabbis. They have communities, they’re also part of a community of rabbis, et cetera. So if they come out with a statement and some important rabbi said the International Beit Din is not kosher, they don’t want to be in that position.

It’s so easy for us in so many instances of life, if I’m not affected personally, I say, isn’t that terrible? I drink my orange juice and go to work. And I think it’s not because people are malevolent. But, you know – Okay. I say it’s terrible and I move on. I think that’s what explains it.

[00:13:29] Leah Sarna: There’s also just a lack of knowledge out there.  Many rabbis and most members of the community just don’t know enough about how the Jewish divorce process is supposed to work.

[00:13:40] Meyer Koplow: One of the other things I’ve learned is that, ordinary rabbis, they don’t learn the laws of divorce. I mean, they’re viewed as sort of this special area that if you are a dayan you’re expert in.

[00:13:57] Leah Sarna: One of the people trying to fix this is Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig, an Israeli expert in halakha who spends a lot of time answering questions from other rabbis. His main work these days is  providing training for rabbis on issues of mental health and Jewish law, but he does a lot on divorce as well.

[00:14:14] Yoni Rosensweig: I think that rabbis are good people. I think that, you know, 99% of them want to help, and are not obviously choosing a side because they’re trying to be evil to someone or trying to make someone’s life miserable.

But I do think that they many times will lack an understanding of the social dynamic or the family dynamic. and because of that lack of understanding, they will mistakenly, take the side of someone who is doing a great evil to another person.

[00:14:47] Leah Sarna: He says, often, rabbis see divorce as a separate process at the end of the marriage. They don’t know how to look for the connections between refusing to give a gett, and abuse throughout the relationship. And that makes malicious demands, and extortion in the divorce, look reasonable.

[00:15:05] Yoni Rosensweig: Like a husband might say, I would like a certain amount of money. in order to give the gett, you know, I need $200,000, $300,000, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, or he might say, I demand that the children will be sent to a certain institution to learn, or he’ll demand full custody, or all kinds of things along those lines. To a rabbi who is adjudicating. Some of those demands might seem, you know, logical and correct. He might say, well, all he wants is his kids to go to a good school. Like, is that such a big deal?

But actually it’s not logical. It is part of a pattern that, you know, has infiltrated the entire marriage and is continuing in this process of divorce where the husband is simply torturing and stringing the woman along.

[00:15:47] Leah Sarna: Not understanding how coercive control works, or even what it looks like, means that it’s really easy for well-intentioned people to miss warning signs.

Anna Cable, a therapist and one of our intake clinicians at the International Beit Din, talks with women when they first come to us. And she says that there’s a deep level of denial, not just in the Jewish community, but everywhere, about how common abuse really is.

[00:16:16] Anna Cable: I think people like to think I will recognize this in my community when I see it. I’ll know the person who is hitting or strangling their wife in secret because I’ll see it on their faces. And you don’t. Abusers are quite controlled, actually, in how they conduct themselves.

[00:16:42] Leah Sarna: The abuse stays between the husband and the wife. It stays in the house.

So when women turn to a rabbi or their community for help, people might not see how dangerous things already are for her. They might say…

[00:16:58] Anna Cable: We don’t want to escalate things. Things are already escalated. There is one human being, dehumanizing and systematically controlling, maybe violently, another human being in their own home and that person has no escape, things are escalated. It just hasn’t escalated to the level where the community can see it.

[00:17:26] Leah Sarna: But there’s another layer to this too.  Here’s Esther Macner

[00:17:30] Esther Macner: I think overall the big picture is that the rabbis are concerned about preserving the institution of marriage. And yes, the woman will be sacrificed.

I think the rabbi’s attitude is, if we start letting women get out marriages easily, the entire fabric of the institution of marriage is gonna collapse.

[00:17:57] Leah Sarna: But what about the women who are going through this?  Why do they think their community leaders let this happen? Here’s Helen.

[00:18:03] Helen: Patriarchy *laughs* Sorry, that’s probably not the right answer you wanted to hear. I think that there’s men and there’s rabbis who benefit from maintaining the patriarchy and allowing gett abuse and agunot to go on, you know, helps maintain the status quo, which is benefiting people.

[00:18:24] Melissa: I think maybe it’s just the easy way out for them. Like they, they’re not willing to fight for the women. and I think they’re on the side of the men. I think they care more about men than they care about women.

[00:18:42] Leah Sarna: So far, we’ve talked about rabbis trying to keep the community together, making choices that might unintentionally hurt women.  But, we also meet clients with horror stories — rabbis who demand bribes or sexual favors in exchange for rulings.

Those Rabbis are a tiny minority, and they know that they are not acting in accordance with Jewish law or in the best interests of the Jewish community. But they exist.

[00:19:15] Leah Sarna: Regardless of the reason that rabbis and members of the community allow this gett abuse to happen — the impacts of treating people this way are real, and massive.

[00:19:26] Shaindy Urman: I think it’s retraumatizing.

[00:19:29] Leah Sarna: Shaindy Urman, is a social worker and the program director for domestic violence services at Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services

[00:19:36] Shaindy Urman: I think when people are coming to somebody in a position of power and coming to a rabbi or a community support and ask, right, “help me,” and then to essentially be told, not just, I can’t help you, but in a way, in a subliminal way, this is your fault. Why don’t you just make him dinner, and then everything will be okay?

It can be retraumatizing to experience the very opposite of what you need in that moment, which is validation and support.

[00:20:08] Leah Sarna: Here’s Anna Cable again.

[00:20:10]  Anna Cable: I don’t think that the intention is let’s sweep this under the rug and pretend it’s not happening. But I do think that the result is an abandonment. Halachic leaders or community members who say, well, we don’t want to make a scene. We don’t want to escalate this. What they’re really saying is to the person who’s being abused, “keep dealing with this on your own. Don’t make a big fuss about this.” And it’s horrible.

[00:20:38] Leah Sarna: For Julia, who you heard from in the first two episodes, when her husband demanded money in exchange for a gett, a rabbi she was working with just threw up his hands and said

[00:20:48] Julia: What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? I’ve dealt with this man before. I know his family. He’s, he’s not gonna do it. He’s not gonna do it.

[00:20:58]  Leah Sarna: It felt like the same betrayal the other women had experienced.

[00:21:02] Julia: And that kind of changed my views on Judaism quite a bit. It made me think that I was being betrayed by religion that I believed in. I was no longer able to live my life.

[00:21:19] Leah Sarna: The magnitude of that betrayal is hard to wrap your head around. It can destroy people’s trust in their religion and in their community. And it can make them give up on the whole process. That was Helen’s philosophy.

[00:21:34]  Helen:  My preference is to remarry a Jew. My preference is to remarry somebody Israeli or Hebrew speaking. ‘Cause that’s important to me. But if I can’t have that because I don’t have a gett, fine, I’ll remarry a goy.  But like, you can’t stop me from remarrying. You can’t stop me from moving on with my life.

[00:21:52]  Melissa: It definitely tramples your faith when you go through something like this.

[00:21:56]  Leah Sarna: Melissa says, she also got to the point where she was ready to just ignore these Jewish traditions around marriage.

[00:22:03] Melissa:  It’s not like I’m the most religious person, but I care enough about it to care about, doing things right and having the gett, but if, if I were to be let down by the community then and by the rabbis, then I would just live my life without it and just marry outside of  Halakha.

[00:22:20] Leah Sarna: And Helen says, it’s logical to expect other women to do the same thing.

[00:22:25] Helen: You want more Jewish babies? Well, if getting divorced is like a horrific traumatic experience. Like less women are gonna get married and have kids.

You care about propagating, you know, the future of the Jewish people. Well, you know, then keep women happy. You know, keep them happy and keep them happy in the sense that like, they have good marriages and if they don’t, they can get out of those marriages.

[00:22:51] Leah Sarna: So, how does the Jewish community put a stop to this? What should people be doing to help women leave abusive marriages and get on with their lives? That’s on the next episode of Getting Free.

[00:23:22] 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

This podcast is generously supported by Micah Philanthropies and trustees Ann and Jeremy Pava, as well as the Meyer G and Ellen Goodstein Koplow Foundation

I’m  Rabbanit Leah Sarna. We’ll be back next week.