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November 20, 1998/ 1 Kislev 5759, Vol. 51, No. 9
Annulment court draws criticism
DEBRA N. COHEN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - The fireworks aren't ending for a 2-year-old religious court that annuls marriages to free Orthodox women whose husbands refuse to grant them a Jewish divorce. Denunciation of the court, which to date has dissolved the marriages of 216 couples, has come from almost every major Orthodox organization, making it a rare issue uniting the centrists and the fervently Orthodox.
The latest salvo came this week from Agudath Israel of America, whose religious arbiters, the Council of Torah Sages, issued a statement calling the rabbis involved in the new Beit Din "arrogant 'Orthodox rabbis' " who "have utilized spurious 'halachic' reasoning to permit married Jewish women to marry again without benefit of a religious divorce."
The religious court in question - the Beit Din L'Ba'ayot Agunot, or Court for the Problems of Chained Women - was established by Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a widely-respected Orthodox elder statesman and chancellor of the Israel's Orthodox Bar-Ilan University, and Rabbi Moshe Morgenstern, who is an accountant by trade.
Rackman and Morgenstern, in interviews, said they annul marriages according to halacha, or Jewish law, following formulas employed by great Orthodox rabbis of the past, including Rabbis Isaac Elchanan, Moshe Feinstein and Eliyahu Klotzkin. They were prompted to act by frustration with what they describe as increasing corruption among rabbis who collude with husbands to extort money from women in need of a get - or Jewish divorce - and with the lack of progress on this issue by rabbinic authorities over the last several decades.
These annulments have engendered fierce criticism. It has played out publicly in a long-running series of articles and letters to the editor in The Jewish Press, an Orthodox newspaper, and in The New York Jewish Week.
"This is not a fight against me. It's a fight against women," said Morgenstern. "This is the issue of male dominance and chauvinism, and keeping women under the foot."
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