Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of ORA (Organization for the Resolution of Agunot), will be the Scholar in Residence at Congregation BIAV June 17-19. His mission is to bring awareness to the growing crisis of agunot, Jewish women whose husbands refuse to give them a religious divorce known as a get.
ORA’s mission is to strive to arrive at quick and amicable resolutions to contested divorces, working in cooperation with an extensive team of attorneys, rabbis, mental health professionals and community volunteers. Its services are free.
Why Husbands Refuse to Give a Get
Founded in 2002, ORA has witnessed more than 1,000 contentious Jewish divorce cases and assisted in resolving 262 protracted divorces. It currently has 70 active cases. ORA has identified four primary motivations for a husband to refuse to issue his wife a get.
No. 1 is money. The husband will use the get for blackmail or extortion to gain a more favorable outcome in the divorce.
“Or simply to say to her ‘What’s the price tag on your freedom,’ so he’ll extort her for a half a million dollars, a million dollars in exchange for the get,” Rabbi Stern said.
No. 2 is custody.
“Custody would be where over the divorce process he’ll say to her you won’t get your get until you give me greater access to the children, beyond what has been determined by an objective party, let’s say a child psychologist or the judge or the rabbinical court, as to what is in the best interest of the children,” said Rabbi Stern. “He’ll use that as leverage and so she has to make a decision: do I have my freedom or do I keep my children safe, which is a horrific decision to have to make.”
A third motivation is spite.
“Without the get, within the Jewish community that means she can’t date, remarry, engage in an intimate relationship with another man, have more children — really move along with her life,” he said.
The fourth motivation is “love.”
“He’s trying to force her back into the relationship and the message he’s not getting is that she’s just not that into you,” he said. “And we’re talking not a few weeks after their separation or even a few months. These are cases of years after their separation; even after the conclusion of the civil divorce he’ll still try to force her back into the relationship.”
Rabbi Stern said these four motivations are fundamentally about control, which is the main message of ORA.
“He's trying to control her, whether it's to extract financial or custodial concessions to control her, to pain her out of spite or to control her in order to force her back into the relationship,” he said. “And this is a critical point, it’s for that reason that get refusal in and of itself is a form of domestic abuse. It’s about a repeated assertion of power and control of one spouse over the other.”
Pre- and Postnuptial Agreements
“Our goal is to go out of business,” Rabbi Stern said. “And our going out of business strategy is to standardize the use of the halachic prenuptial agreement for the prevention of get refusal. We have seen this agreement work 100 percent of the time in preventing situations of recalcitrance and so if we can get everyone to sign it then we can go out of business.”
He said the challenge is that in introducing this new element to the Jewish wedding, some may think you’re casting aspersions on their marriage — do you think I’m that kind of person, that we get divorced and I treat you this way, etc.
“So what we’re trying to do is normalize the procedure; it’s just a normal thing that people do, everyone signs a prenuptial agreement, like an insurance policy,” the rabbi said.
It’s like a vaccine in the sense that if everyone takes it, you’re not putting the community at risk, he said. Although there are no hard statistics, Rabbi Stern said within the modern Orthodox community, which is what ORA is focusing on, prenuptials are becoming more prevalent.
ORA is also trying to normalize the behavior of having postnuptial parties.
“The idea there is that couples who have been happily married, for decades even, will sign the postnuptial agreement in order to make this a de rigueur behavior in the community,” said Rabbi Stern. “If everyone signs it, not because any individual is anticipating divorce, you can successfully inoculate the community.”
In ORA’s office in New York City, many engaged couples go in to sign prenuptial agreements, but rarely do couples go there to sign postnuptials. That’s why ORA has postnuptial parties in various communities in which the synagogue invites its membership to sign the postnuptial agreement, which is what BIAV is doing on Sunday, June 19. (See box for details.)
Putting on the Pressure
A seruv is a rabbinic order of contempt, which states that a beit din (religious court) has declared an individual is recalcitrant, has refused to comply with Jewish law and participate in the Jewish divorce process with the issuance or receipt of the get. But there is no real enforcement power to it. The husband has been found in contempt, but they can’t put him in jail or fine him.
“That’s really where my organization gets involved and we try to enforce the terms of the seruv, which means specifically that we try to ensure that the husband is persona non grata in the Jewish community, essentially to ostracize him from the community,” Rabbi Stern said.
Whenever ORA takes on a case, it tries to resolve it amicably at first, organizing communication between the two sides for the issuance of a get, making sure it’s not used as a tool for leverage. The rabbi said if that doesn’t work after extensive mediation, then they resort to forms of pressure that are permissible both as a matter of Jewish and civil law.
“We don’t call the mob or the hit squad or anything like that, but we organize peaceful demonstrations outside of the home of the recalcitrant husband,” said Rabbi Stern. “We’ll make sure he’s ostracized from the community, that no one is supporting him, you might boycott his business, anything we can do to try and pressure him with the very, very simple message that you need to give the get, which is a process that can take five minutes of your time and come at no cost to you and all of this will go away.”
Rabbi Stern said some people ask why these women stay Orthodox; why don’t they just give it up. They blame the woman for sticking to the old system of Jewish law. Since they’re civilly divorced, they should just move on. But that’s asking them to give up their religion and beliefs.
“This is their system of meaning; it’s their spirituality; it’s who they are; it’s their community, and to point the finger at them and say you should be leaving that, you’re civilly divorced, what do you need this religion for is pointing the finger at the victim rather than at the aggressor,” he said. “The recalcitrant husband is not playing his role in issuing the get.”
For Rabbi Stern’s complete schedule, email .
Postnuptial Party
The public is invited for a morning of mimosas and dairy desserts to learn more about the agunah crisis and what we as a community can do about it. The event will take place from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Sunday, June 19, at Congregation BIAV.
Scholar-in-Residence Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, will help raise awareness about this important issue and discuss why halachic pre- and postnuptial agreements are the most effective tools for preventing future agunot.
Notaries and the documents necessary for signing halachic postnuptial agreements will be onsite for interested couples.
All community members are invited, regardless of marital status or desire to participate in signing a postnuptial. The event is free of charge.