According to
Halakha (Jewish law) traditionally when a couple gets divorced the man has to present the woman with a bill of divorce, called a
get. Without one the couple is still viewed as married, whether a civil divorce is obtained or not. In the past, if a woman was refused a divorce because a man would not give his wife a get, the rabbis of the local Jewish community were authorized, under certain circumstances, to force the husband to do so (e.g., his refusal to be intimate with his wife as well as not giving the get), However since the
Haskalah (Enlightenment) the local Jewish communities lost their autonomous status, and were merged into the nations in which they lived. Since the Jewish community lost its civil powers to enforce marriage and divorce laws. The unintended result was that rabbis lost the power to force a man to give his wife a
get, and Jewish law traditionally does not allow a woman to give a get to the husband. Without a get, a Jewish woman is forbidden to remarry and is therefore called an agunah (literally "an chained woman").
At the 1998 Jerusalem Agunot Conference, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz, the Chairman of the Joint Bet Din of the Conservative Movement, explained the four approaches taken by leaders of Conservative Judaism to find remedies for the problem of the Agunah what follow is my summary of his remark, outlining four approaches to this issue:
One beginning in the 1950's, the inclusion of the Lieberman clause,in the Ketubah, requiring that a get be granted if a civil divorce is ever issued. Later, because some civil courts viewed the enforcement of a religious document as a violation of the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, Conservative rabbis began to require couples to sign a separate letter, stating that the clause had been explained to them as part of pre-marital counseling, and that both parties understood and agreed to its conditions, recognizing that this letter would constitute a separate civil document, enforceable in a civilian court./ However, many Conservative rabbis, including some on the movement's own law committee, had growing concerns regarding the clause for religious reasons.
The second approach was based on the concept of something called conditional marriages, t'nai b'kiddushin, and was based in part on past approaches used by both French and Turkish rabbis—but, according to Rabinowitz—had improvements gleaned from lessons learned from those past experiences. The ketubah was not changed, but a separate pre-marital agreement was signed, and in the presence of the rabbinical court, the prospective groom read it, and the prospective bride stated that she agreed to it. The agreement was that the parties understood that if a civil divorce were ever granted, then a get must be delivered within six months of that date. A refusal to abide by that agreement would give the court no choice but to consider the original marriage, and the original declaration of the groom, so flawed that it would be as if that marriage never occurred.
The third approach was to coerce the recalcitrant husband to grant a get. These included pressure on the husband with financial implications, liens from organizations of which he is a part of and through spiritual guidance.
The final approach was adopted by a unanimous vote of the law committee, when it was decided that the Joint Bet Din of the Conservative Movement could annul marriages as a last resort, based on the Talmudic principle of hafka’at kiddushin – the same principle used to compel the husband to act in option number two. By doing this, the rabbinical establishment returned much of the power of the process of divorce to the rabbinical court, returning to its original source and giving woman clear recourse for contentious situations.
Answered by: Rabbi Elianna Yolkut
