It sounds like a dark fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm: A young and lovely woman marries a successful young man. A daughter arrives. But the story takes a turn. The couple quarrel. The young bride flees with the baby daughter to her parents. Then the young man casts a spell, condemning the woman to a life in chains; not with him, not with anyone. No more family. Take a little literary license with the spell and you've got the story of Aharon Friedman and Tamar Epstein, Orthodox Jews who divorced through Maryland civil courts -- in what sounds like an entirely uncivil manner -- but who have not yet been divorced by a Beit Din, a Jewish Rabbinical court. The reason is that Friedman, 34, a congressional committee aide working for Rep. Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, has refused to give Epstein a get, a Jewish writ of divorce.
Without a get, by Jewish Orthodox law, the 27-year-old Epstein is forever bound to her husband -- she is an agunah, a woman in chains, a "grass widow" in the eyes of the community. She may never marry, she may never have other children.
In our secular society, the idea of a religious court holding sway over our private lives seems like a fairy tale -- or something out of our deepest, most fantastical idea of Sharia law, something like stoning, say, for adultery. But for the hundreds of women in the United States and Israel, and elsewhere in the greater Jewish diaspora, whose husbands, out of spite or malice or both, refuse to issue them a get, are condemned to a life of social limbo.
They are nothing; forever in suspension. In the Orthodox Jewish world, family and marital status is absolutely everything in adult life; without the freedom of a get, there is no future. It is as though Epstein, and the women like her, have been condemned to wander a desert for 120 years. On the website for the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (the plural of Agunah in Hebrew), some 35 women are listed as those "to pray for" their quick resolution. In Israel there is even an "Agunah Day" (around the holiday of Purim). There are women who wait decades for their stories to find resolution.
And in Israel -- governed entirely by religious law for marriages -- even women who are less religious can be affected. Children born from other unions will be considered illegitimate by the state. "Very few women want .....
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