When you think of an agunah (a woman chained to a dead marriage) in your head, she’s probably some faceless babushka doll. Nothing like me, that’s for sure. Nobody I would ever know. 

That’s what I thought, until it happened to a friend of mine. 

We had been roommates, I danced at her wedding, and then — years later – she wanted a halakhic divorce, and her husband refused. My friend was an agunah.

And that’s when I learned that even though I had been hearing about agunot my whole life, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it until I saw it up close, and it was nothing like anything I had ever been taught.

You shouldn’t need to know any agunot personally in order to understand what they go through, but the truth is — it is hard to understand. The status feels foreign, old-fashioned, like someone whose husband went out to fight in World War I and never came back, or someone from the Middle Ages whose husband traveled to a fair in faraway lands and evaporated. How can it be that 9/11 left no agunot, and yet there are thousands all over the world?

The answer is that the husbands of today’s agunot have not disappeared (it’s nearly impossible to disappear in today’s world). Today’s iggun is about something else entirely, and it’s not what you might think. It’s not a “he-said-she-said” messy divorce or an unfair custody agreement. Surprisingly, today’s iggun is barely about the end of marriage at all. 

It’s about men holding their wives captive on purpose: during their marriage through a type of domestic abuse called coercive control, and then attempting to continue that control after the marriage is over through iggun. 

These real stories of today’s agunot are nearly impossible to tell. They involve deep, complex trauma. For many agunot, telling their story in full would compromise the wellbeing of their children or their own physical safety. It might well open them up to expensive, ongoing, abusive litigation. And above any of that that: who wants to be known by the worst thing ever perpetrated against them?

This is why the stories of today’s agunot largely go unknown outside of the private walls of domestic violence social service organizations and the confidentiality of the beit din (rabbinic court) and family court hearings.

The experience of watching my friend go through iggun not only opened my eyes to this hidden truth, but also motivated me towards a career pivot, and I joined the staff of the International Beit Din, a trauma-informed beit din, a rabbinic court dedicated to resolving cases of iggun with compassion and dignity. I am its director of Public Education and Media, and it is my job to find ways to tell these difficult stories, because until we really understand iggun, we cannot make lasting change. 

So we decided to create a limited-series podcast. Out of the hundreds of cases our beit din has heard, five brave women agreed to tell their stories in their own voices, on the record. One of them is Melissa.

Melissa met her husband in Israel, while swiping on Tinder. She had close friends, a career in marketing startups, and, while she dreamed of a family, she wasn’t in a rush. One day she was swiping for fun, and his smile stopped her in her tracks. They met, and, in her words, “he seemed like a really good person with like a big heart. I thought he would be a good husband and a good father.” Soon, they were looking at wedding halls together. 

Coercive control builds up slowly. So slowly, in fact, that even the women going through it themselves often cannot see it at first. 

In retrospect, Melissa’s wedding planning process was full of red flags. “It ended up being that everything that he said he wanted, I just ended up agreeing to because he would just wear me down. He wore me down every time until I had felt like, okay, it’s just easier to avoid a fight.”

At the time, of course, she was in love, and she couldn’t possibly see the red flags, so they got married. When she was pregnant with their first child, things got worse. Her experience of pregnancy was stressful, and jigsaw puzzles calmed her down. One day, her husband was so mad at her (about nothing in particular) that he destroyed a puzzle she had nearly completed. That’s when she fully saw his cruelty for the first time. 

It only escalated once the baby was born, as her husband repeatedly threatened to take the baby away whenever she asked him for assistance or support. Melissa put up with it for a few more years, and they had another child together. Until the rage, threats, and abuse turned to her children directly. That’s when she left.

When she asked for a get, he didn’t pretend, he just named his price: an $800,000 home. 

So why are there still agunot today? Because men like Melissa’s husband, men who  manipulate, dominate and isolate their wives during their marriages have no interest in giving up their control. When their wives demand freedom, the husbands use every tool and lever to continue their captivity: extortion, litigation abuse, get-withholding and more. 

These stories are hard to tell and hard to hear. The best way to hear the stories of agunot is in their own voices, on our podcast, called Getting Free, which launched on Sunday, March 1, just in time for this year’s International Agunah Day, on Taanit Esther – the Fast of Esther, for the Purim heroine was chained to a marriage characterized by control and domination like none other.

International Agunah Day was founded 36 years ago, and since then, very little has changed. So this year, on International Agunah Day, we at the International Beit Din are trying a new approach.

Change begins with listening.

What if the needle has barely moved in 36 years because so many people, even those who really, truly care, do not fully understand what iggun today is about? So we’re asking you to listen. Getting Free gives you the stories of five agunot in their own voices. On this International Agunah Day, mark the day by listening. And then keep listening, as we drop new episodes every week until just before Pesach, the holiday of freedom, when you will hear how four of the five women got free.

One is still waiting – and by listening to her story, you can help her, and countless other women in situations just like hers. 

Listen to Getting Free – wherever you get your podcasts or at: www.internationalbeitdin.org/gettingfree

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)