The Tears Of The Oppressed: An Examination Of The Agunah Problem: Background And Halakhic Sources
by Aviad Hacohen
Category: Law

New Book Seeks Agunah Solutions An Israeli legal scholar offers rabbinic sources to show precedents for leniency in freeing women from marital limbo. Debra Nussbaum Cohen--Staff Writer. A new book by an Israeli legal expert, Aviad Hacohen, promises to return to public attention the legal technique used to dissolve the marriages of agunot, women whose estranged husbands refused to grant them a Jewish divorce, an approach which prompted waves of controversy in 1997, when it was first used. That was when Rabbi Emmanuel Rackman, chancellor emeritus of Bar Ilan University, went public with the fact that he was employing little-used aspects of Jewish law in order to free hundreds of women whose husbands were keeping them legally chained to dead marriages. Rabbi Rackman's work was met with criticism from rabbis in virtually all sectors of the Orthodox world. But, with the assistance of a handful of rabbinic colleagues and supportive women, he has continued to solve the dilemmas of agunot, doing so for several dozen in the last year or two and several hundred in total, he said in an interview. The heart of the new book The Tears of the Oppressed: An Examination of the Agunah Problem--Background and Halachic Sources (Ktav), is devoted to the same legal principle that Rabbi Rackman employed: kiddushei ta' ut, or mistaken marriage, a principle based on asserting that the marriage was never authentic and therefore need not be annulled. The book, edited by Blu Greenberg, a Jewish Orthodox feminist leader, offers 28 rabbinic legal decisions, originally published from the 12th through 20th centuries, as precedents for solving the agunot dilemma through this application. For scholars, the bookincludes facsimiles of the original decisions; some are well known, and others Hacohen unearthed from near-forgotten files at Israel's National Library.