[00:00:08] Leah Sarna: Welcome to Getting Free. This is our final episode. Over the course of this podcast, we’ve told the stories of women who struggle to leave abusive marriages only to face another almost impossible hurdle, getting their husbands to agree to a religious divorce. We’ve mapped out the ways that the Jewish community misunderstands their struggles or even makes them worse, and even talked about creative ways to free these women.

[00:00:35] Leah Sarna: But what comes next? What can we do to move the needle on this issue? To find out, I’m here today with Rabbi Barry Dolinger, executive Director of the International Beit Din and Anna Cable, one of our intake specialists, and a social worker who focuses on trauma. Welcome.

[00:00:57] Anna Cable: Nice to be here.

[00:00:58] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: Thank you so much.

[00:00:59] Leah Sarna: Before we turn to questions about big systems. Let’s talk about what individual people can do. So if I’m a normal person, I’m not a rabbi, I’m not a beit din, I’m just a regular person who listened to Getting Free, what can I do to support women who are stuck in these marriages? We have an example of someone doing this in one of our episodes.

[00:01:21] Leah Sarna: So let’s start with Julia’s story, where it was her boss who showed up for her

[00:01:27] Julia: When I went back with my boss and his wife. To pick up a couple of things. As I started walking towards the building, I started shaking and they just put their arms around me. That’s not how we, we always feel about our bosses, but they, they were amazing, and he just kept saying to me, you’re safe. It’s okay. You’re safe.

[00:01:46] Leah Sarna: So Anna, maybe we’ll start with you. If you suspect that someone you know is in a marriage characterized by coercive control, what can you do to help?

[00:01:56] Anna Cable: Well, one thing that is very powerful in the example we just heard is that this woman was offered support without any demand for information or explanation or suggestions.

[00:02:09] Anna Cable: Women in these coercive relationships are being dehumanized and denigrated on a regular basis, and being shown open compassion in sort of simple daily ways. Receptivity to hearing how somebody is, smiling at somebody, making space for somebody in a conversation can be very helpful.

[00:02:40] Anna Cable:  In a more direct way it can be helpful to say things like, I’m always here if you need to talk. Or please let me know if there’s anything I can do, or just so you know, you’ve got a friend here, something that opens the door, but really does not demand that somebody walk through because walking through the door to talking about what’s going on in the home can be dangerous and can be frightening both emotionally and physically.

[00:03:08] Anna Cable: And then I think believing. What is said when the woman does come through the door, however outrageous it sounds. There’s so many examples I have of cases that we’ve heard where you think you can’t make this stuff up. It’s not the sort of thing that we talk about in daily conversation. I think to be prepared that what you hear may not be what you’re imagining.

[00:03:33] Anna Cable: And to not feel like your role is to advise or to pass judgment on, well, did you really understand that correctly? But just to be there and listen and provide warmth and understanding, and, and I’m here,

[00:03:48] Leah Sarna: Barry, is there anything you you would wanna add to that?

[00:03:51] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: Just piggybacking on what Anna said. A lot of times we see that people want to intervene and are well intentioned, but those interventions can become about themselves and can become kind of self-important in the lives of the helpers.

[00:04:10] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And maybe they’re trying to help, right? So they seek advice from their friend who’s a lawyer or who’s a therapist, and then they come with a lot of suggestions and advice, the story has become their story and, and how they’re going to help as a hero.

[00:04:22] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: I guess the other thing. I would add that I’ve noticed is that, isolation is part of what the women have experienced in their relationships almost exclusively, and it’s very toxic. And often that stigma and isolation persists or, or morphs after, a person is out of the marital home. And so the antidote to isolation are social relationships and social support.

[00:04:49] Leah Sarna: So let’s back it up for a second. We heard from. A few of the women about how there were some red flags that they saw. In retrospect when they think back on their dating or that they even noticed at the time while they were planning for their wedding, right. We heard that from Melissa.

[00:05:05] Melissa: It ended up being that everything that he said he wanted, I just ended up agreeing to because he would just wear you down. He like wore me down every time until I had felt like, okay, it’s just easier to avoid a fight.

[00:05:18] Leah Sarna: If you’re the friend. In that situation where the wedding hasn’t happened yet, how can you bring it up with someone? What types of interventions might actually be effective?

[00:05:28] Anna Cable: I want people to take a broader lens here because I think to be most effective, the intervention.Really happens on a community-wide basis before anything has gotten to that point. You know, it’s like if you think about how do you stop someone from smoking? Well, you help them not start in the first place. It’s a public health message. It’s not a targeted intervention. But if you do have a scenario where somebody is, they’re not sort of locked in, in a way they’ve not gotten married, but they’re heading in that direction,

[00:06:06] Anna Cable: I certainly encourage people to say things like, and I would never do this in text, I would never do this over the phone. ’cause you don’t know who’s listening. But in person to say something like, you know. When you mentioned this story to me or when I saw this happen, I just thought, you don’t deserve that because then you’re not making a statement about the other person. You’re not making a statement about the whole situation.

[00:06:33] Anna Cable: You’re just making a statement about the treatment that your friend deserves and pointing out you deserve kindness and compassion. And often people will find themselves when they attempt to intervene in an abusive situation, finding the person that they’re concerned about coming to the abuser’s defense.

[00:06:54] Anna Cable: And I think it’s a way to sort of short circuit that defensiveness to say something like, I hear what you’re saying. I just know that I love you and I would always want you treated with kindness.

[00:07:07] Leah Sarna: Let’s move forward into, into a marriage. If your friend tells you they’re considering running away from their abusive husband, what do you need to know and how can you help them the most?

[00:07:18] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: I should probably preface this right? I’m speaking as a rabbi, not as an expert in domestic violence. The moments when people leave relationships are incredibly dangerous and fraught, and unfortunately, the IBD case files are ripe with. Women who attempted to leave, and usually that’s the precipitating cause of an event that turned physically dangerous or was a life-threatening event.

[00:07:44] Leah Sarna:  We heard about this in a previous episode…

[00:07:46] Shaindy Urman: the most dangerous time for a person in an abusive relationship

[00:07:48] Rabbi Zach Truboff: one of the most vulnerable times.

[00:07:50] Esther Macner: The most dangerous time for a woman

[00:07:54] Leah: It’s the moment she decides to leave.

[00:07:58] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And that’s just the danger side of it –  there are so many other factors, too. Many, many times bank accounts have been emptied or networks have already been cut off from isolation.

[00:08:08] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And so women seeking to leave have totally legitimate concerns about how will I pay for food for my children tomorrow or. Who will pay for a hotel room tonight until a shelter can process and take me in. It may be a safer option for women to stay in a dangerous and an abusive relationship than just to flee into kind of uncertainty. So I think just the first piece of advice is proceed with caution.

[00:08:31] Anna Cable: I would say do not try to help your friend on your own unless you have specific training in this issue. There are domestic violence agencies everywhere. Your friend probably can’t Google them, right? Sometimes people don’t have access to their phones or somebody is checking what they Google. Make some phone calls yourself to whatever domestic violence support agencies are near you, and ask them, help us come up with a safety plan.

[00:09:06] Anna Cable: You can be the conduit for your friend to match up with some of these agencies who can do things like offer emergency shelter. Coordinate with the police to get a restraining order in as safe a way as possible so there’re supports out there and use them.

[00:09:24] Leah Sarna: So if I hear about someone in my community who has fled their marriage, someone who’s not my friend, I just hear about it, maybe I hear about it, and it totally backwards or negative light. She went crazy and ran away with absconded with the children. And I don’t know this person very well, but now I’ve listened to Getting Free and I have a sense, wow, that narrative that she went crazy and stole the kids, that might not be what actually happened here. What should I do now as just a member of a community in which that story is floating around?

[00:09:56] Anna Cable: Invite them for Shabbos. I mean, don’t invite them for Shabbos and be like, I heard something terrible happened to you. You know, think about what would you like? From a community, if you were having a really bad week, these women are human, you know? So invite them for Shabbos like you would for somebody who you knew was going through a move and maybe their kitchen wasn’t set up.

[00:10:19] Anna Cable: Don’t ask them a ton of nosy questions. Just be a friendly presence. If they say, no big deal. Invite them again next month. You know, this is a marathon, not a sprint. The Jewish communal framework has a lot of tools in there for reducing isolation and building connection. So use those, treat them the way you’d, you’d wanna be treated.

[00:10:41] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: One of the things I think we’ve seen. Community leadership do well in that regard is utilize the kind of bureaucracy of Jewish life as a method to empower and include people. So I think about the synagogue rabbi who invited someone who had gone through this to his board or the synagogue rabbi who invited a client to the wedding of his daughter, when usually only the machers and the wealthy donors got invited to that sort of wedding.

[00:11:12] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: There was another woman who mentioned that when it had come out, she found that suddenly her daughter had play date invitations again, and she suspected that members of the community schemed in order to make sure her daughter felt reintegrated after years of isolation that affected not just the woman but her, her children and the family. So I do think it is these basic things, but being intentional about shifting from kind of neutrality or taboo to social support and interaction.

[00:11:44] Leah Sarna: So, I’m still a member of this community and I have heard this woman’s side of the story, but I know her husband also. Is there anything I can do to help that might involve talking to him?

[00:11:55] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: Hell no. So many times even interventions to try and negotiate, for example, for a gett right, what do they do? They shift the control and all of the power back to the husband. We all know that you should ignore a bully if you can safely do so and so intervening with the husband in any way. First of all, you don’t know what’s going on, but second of all, you’re just shifting the locus of power back to the bully and that’s precisely what we don’t wanna be doing.

[00:12:27] Leah Sarna: So far, we’ve been talking about what individual people can do when they find themselves or a loved one in a situation with abuse or gett refusal. But when we talk about ending iggun. That project requires social change. So in episode five, we just heard some serious reservations about some of the biggest social change actions out there like protests or siruv because they compromise the survivor’s privacy. Here’s a clip from the show.

[00:12:57] Emily: And I wish there was another way for this to happen other than publicly shaming somebody that is somebody that you used to love and care about. You know, many, many women are still co-parenting with their ex-husband, and that’s just not something that children should ever have to experience.

[00:13:16] Leah Sarna: What do we think about these big public actions?

[00:13:18] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: I don’t think there’s a one size fits all approach. Getting free is not about a piece of paper or a status. It’s about empowerment and humanity. You know, if there’s a. A woman who really doesn’t want the specter of public protests, which will be memorialized forever on the internet to hang as a shadow over her children when they grow up and Google their father’s name, or if she doesn’t want it to further sour a co-parenting relationship with an ex. But, but nonetheless, the community insists on doing so, it actually is a kind of virtue signaling of the community that is both ineffective and harmful.

[00:14:02] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: It retraumatizes and further disempowers a person. On the other hand if a woman is feeling isolated. And really wants her community to draw a line in the sand and feels that a public protest very clearly supports her in a situation where neutrality would support the abuser, then a public protest could be extremely helpful and therapeutic. So I think there’s just not a one size fits all answer. It’s gotta be devised in kind of smart and wise consultation with a woman and her support network.

[00:14:36] Anna Cable: I think part of that is trusting women to be the experts on their own experience rather than people to be rescued. You know, if someone’s drowning, you just pull them out of the water. That’s not what this is. This is somebody’s tied in a very complicated knot and they’re our best source of information about the most strategic way to get them out.

[00:15:00] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: There are two things about protests also, which, you know, generally give me some concern. One of them is that often the men have demonstrated an addiction to revenge. So protesting kind of feeds into the dynamic, but it’s also unlikely to achieve any results. It’s often protests of third parties, employers, family members who are supportive, et cetera, that are more effective because those folks are not tied to this relationship in a harmful and irrational way.

[00:15:40] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: The second thing about protests is we’ve seen many cases where there are clear grounds In Jewish law, the woman’s marriage is not valid, clearly not kosher witnesses or something like that at the wedding. But the community is engaged in all of these efforts which may be harmful when really it, it should be at best, a matter of Last recourse, especially when there are other legal mechanisms, which could be clearly used, but there’s a kind of knee jerk to go to the protest as this is what we do.

[00:16:08] Leah Sarna: So you mentioned that there are other solutions to ending these marriages, which we describe in episode five.

[00:16:17] Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig: If the husband is being recalcitrant, if he’s being very, very obtuse, you know, et cetera, et cetera, then the beit din may have another avenue, which is the nullification of the marriage.

[00:16:29] Leah Sarna: But from sort of a social change perspective, right, because if someone’s gonna rule that the witnesses weren’t kosher, that’s not something that your average listener can effectuate on their own. So what are some other social change action items that a listener could say, oh, that’s something I can try and bring about in the world.

[00:16:48] Anna Cable: The first thing I would say is that the children in our community really need to be taught better about consent and about communication and about healthy relationships because it is not surprising  if you have a setting where children are not talked to explicitly about how to resolve conflict, where bullies may not be confronted where children are taught to be ashamed or afraid of asking questions about intimacy and relationships.

[00:17:29] Anna Cable: It is actually completely unsurprising that abusive relationships would occur because nobody can know what red flags are. If you don’t know what the green flags are. And kids do not figure this stuff out on their own. In fact, children will naturally look to mimic the behavior that they see in a community. And so we know the Jewish community is one where there is a crisis of these abusive relationships and agunot, and that is a place [00:19:00] where I think there can be really effective community organizing and mobilization because you know, you can go to the head of your synagogue, to your rabbi, to somebody at your children’s school and say, Hey, I wanna have a workshop on healthy relationships for our fifth graders. And that is a place where I think community members actually have a lot of power versus trying to intervene in particular marriages and divorces and their outcomes.

[00:18:40] Leah Sarna: The stories we’ve heard have painted a somewhat grim picture of the beit din system and our listeners, regular Jews in the pews, might be feeling like, okay, these are horrible stories, but I don’t even know the name of my local beit din. I don’t know the names of the dayanim who serve on it. I don’t know the first thing about it. What can I do now that I understand in order to make sure that my beit din is a safe place for people who need its help and that it’s actually helping people?

[00:19:15] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: When there’s obscurity and darkness, abuse can grow unfettered. There are you ways to find out about the local beit din. One way you could do that is by contacting our team at the international beit din. One of the things we love to do is advising people about which forums to go to and what they can expect in those forums, who can represent them well in those forums, who has good relationships there so that they’re likely to get a fair hearing and a good result, and who does not? That’s one thing people can do.

[00:19:50] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: I’ll call attention to another project, which we’re not involved with, but I think is very admirable. The Rate My Beit Din project, which is an effectively the Yelp of Batei Din. It’s an online website where people can read the accounts of other people and the ratings of folks that have used rabbinic courts for their divorce. You know, you wouldn’t go to a hotel without first reading the TripAdvisor reviews or the Google reviews, and yet you trust someone with your custody dispute or you know your assets for the rest of your life without reading a review. And so, Rate My Beit Din exists, and folks can both survey, but also leave reviews. If you had a great experience, let other people know so that they can do it, and if you did not, also let other people know.

[00:20:31] Leah Sarna: So if listeners could take one thing away from Getting Free, what would you want it to be?

[00:20:36] Anna Cable: I think I would want people to take away that these are changes that are possible. They don’t require anybody to become a superhero or become an expert on any of these. Issues. They require a sense of hope, a willingness to be compassionate, and to expand one’s humanity. And I believe the listeners of this podcast, people would be interested in this, are very capable of that. There is a lot that is possible. I don’t think there’s any kind of extraordinary heroic action that any one person needs to take. I really think this is a community change. And to change a community, you have to be the member of the community you would wanna be in.

[00:21:21] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: in Jewish law, there’s no excuse, really none for conditioning a gett, delaying a gett. There’s no excuse for it, and so it actually helps clarify the matter for folks looking on from the outside. When someone won’t give a gett, it’s never more complicated. We shouldn’t need a kind of bat signal that tells us we can believe women, but we have it here. It doesn’t matter if you know him. It doesn’t matter if he’s a great professor. Doesn’t matter if he’s a well-regarded lawyer, judge, donor to the community, your best friend doesn’t really matter when a man refuses to give a gett.

[00:22:03] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: In our experience, it means that a woman has lived through coercive control. That means that her daily activities have been micro regulated along gender lines, right? And so her body and her appearance, child rearing tactics and education, domestic life, cooking and home life have all been a source of torture and terror for as long as the marriage has gone on.

[00:22:30] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And people need to know that when a man refuses to give a gett, it’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg and that that’s what the iceberg looks like underneath the water. It gives you a sense of the type of person you’re dealing with.

[00:22:42] Leah Sarna: As our listeners know, this podcast is a project of the International Beit Din, but at no point in this podcast have we fully explained what the International Beit Din is, what we set out to do, what we’re working on, and how people can get involved. So I’d love for us to turn our energy and attention there.

[00:23:00] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: Look, we wanna work together to build a world where when women go to get divorced. Their rabbinic courts, their communal leadership, and the members that comprise communities are committed to justice and a world without extortion and abuse in the divorce process.

[00:23:18] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And if there is abuse in the relationship where it’s a signal to those communities to come to empowering assistance. We’re working to try and build that world in three ways. The first is that we are a rabbinic court. We have incredible rabbinic judges who are truly the experts in this field. They are all rabbis of stature in Israel, and they exercise empathic and courageous leadership here.

[00:23:44] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: And so we take cases and we resolve them. And by the way, most of the time, we’re able to resolve them even in cases where everyone else has given up or deemed it impossible. Two. We work with men and women, but primarily women in other rabbinic courts to try and advise them about what to do, but also to dialogue with those courts, to try and educate those courts and communities often very effectively, so that they’re well positioned to know what we know to help the women in their communities.

[00:24:17] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: But it’s not just Rabbinic Courts. Educating the public is crucial, and so we engage in dynamic trauma-informed, human-centered public education like this podcast so that folks hear real stories in the voices of the women who have lived these experiences so that they can understand what to do. We publish books and articles. We have a guide to Jewish divorce coming out, for all Jewish divorcing individuals that will explain the landscape. Knowledge is power. And so public education for us is crucial in creating a transparent and a functional system that is well representative of our great faith in religion.

[00:25:01] Leah Sarna: And if someone says, I’ve listened to getting free one of the public education pieces of our work, and I wanna get involved with the International beit Din, and what are some ways that people can show support to our work and to the agunot who we help all day long.

[00:25:19] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: The simplest and easiest way to support public education projects like this or our direct client services is by becoming a one-time or monthly supporter of the international Beit Din as an emissary of the court. You can do that on our website internationalbeitdin.org A second thing you can do is sign up for our mailing list, also on the website, and stay educated about our programs, events, and latest educational materials. And a third thing you can do is reach out to us to bring a member of our team into your community, or help organize an affinity support group there in order to educate the community and support women where you live.

[00:26:01] Leah Sarna: Thank you so much Anna and Rabbi Dollinger for coming in. Really appreciate your taking the time and sharing your wisdom with our listeners.

[00:26:10] Rabbi Barry Dolinger: Thank you so much

 

[00:26:11] Anna Cable: Nice to be here.

 

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[00:26:19] Leah Sarna:  That was our final episode of 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.

Before we go, I want to give a special thank you to the women of Getting Free. Alla, Amit, Emily, Helen, Julia, and Melissa—- we couldn’t have made this podcast without you. Thank you for trusting us with your stories.

Thank you also to Naomi Stein and Harshita Lakhiani for your work behind the scenes, and to Suzy Schultz for help with marketing.

This episode was produced by Megan Hall and Nat Hardy

With sound design and mixing by Nat Hardy

Tape syncs throughout the series by Alex Lewis

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. Thank you for listening