On November 17, 2013, Unchained At Last presented
The reading of a play about arranged marriage
Featuring Alysia Reiner and Michelle Hurst of “Orange Is the New Black”
Written by Susan Merson • Produced by the Jewish Plays Project
Followed by a panel discussion about arranged/forced marriage in the U.S.
At The Dillon, 425 W. 53 Street, New York City
A haredi mother, an Ethiopian professor and an American expatriate struggle to help a young Israeli woman secretly pregnant by a Palestinian man – but about to enter an arranged marriage with the rabbi’s son. Bounty of Lace explores the experience of women in a war-torn region dominated by male agendas.
David Winitsky is the artistic director of the Jewish Plays Project, a collaborator with StorahTelling and a PresenTense New York City Fellow. He has directed or assisted on Broadway, off Broadway and regionally at Papermill Playhouse, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, California Shakespeare Festival and Philadelphia Theatre Company. David holds an MFA in directing from Northwestern University and a BA in mathematics from Cornell.
Unchained thanks the following people for making Bounty of Lace possible: Jeanne Gordon, Melina Spadone, David Winitsky, Susan Merson, Mark Berkley, Kelly Schultz and all of the sponsors, performers and panelists.
Newsweek describes how leaving an arranged marriage in the Orthodox Jewish community can be “brutal, degrading and endless” for women — and talks about how Unchained helps such women, as well as women from any culture or religion that practices arranged/forced marriage.
Divorce in the Orthodox Jewish Community Can Be Brutal, Degrading and Endless
“Only three days into the marriage, I knew I made a terrible mistake.”
Gital Dodelson, 25, wrote those words about her 2009 marriage to Avrohom Meir Weiss in an explosive essay in the New York Post last week.
After a short courtship and engagement (typical in the Orthodox Jewish community), Dodelson thought she had everything she wanted: the 400-person wedding, the lace dress, the white rose bouquet and, of course, Weiss, a Talmudic scholar from a prominent rabbinic family on Staten Island — until, she says, she discovered Weiss was “controlling and belittling.”
The marriage unraveled quickly.
“It was our first Shabbat together as man and wife — and it was spent in silence,” she wrote in the Post. According to Dodelson, Weiss controlled the family finances despite not having a job (he studied at his yeshiva full-time while she worked and went to school). She also claims he refused to hire a housekeeper when she was pregnant or see a marriage counselor, and got angry when she tried to pick her own doctor. After 10 months of marriage, Dodelson and her newborn son, Aryeh, moved in with her parents.
She divorced Weiss in civil court in August 2012, but says he refuses to give her a “get,” or religious divorce transaction necessary in Orthodox Judaism to finalize a divorce, leaving her unable to move on in her community.
Dodelson’s friends launched a website, SetGitalFree.com, to help publicize her situation. A Facebook page, Free Gital: Tell Avrohom Meir Weiss to Give His Wife a “Get,” has over 13,000 likes. Weiss’ side of the story, however, remains largely absent from media reports. Newsweek has been unable to reach Weiss or his family. However, Weiss’ father, Rabbi Yosaif Asher Weiss, spoke exclusively to the Staten Island Advance, saying: “Our family is horrified by the vitriol, lies and hate that permeate Gital’s article… This is a very, very heart-wrenching and ongoing dispute. We’ve been trying desperately to resolve this for a long time. This has destroyed my family health wise and destroyed my family financially.”
Dodelson’s story is not unique in the world of Orthodox Judaism, where men hold all of the power when it comes to terminating marriages.
According to Jewish law, a wife can refuse to accept a divorce initiated by her husband, but only a husband can initiate and finalize religious divorce proceedings. Even if a woman obtains a civil divorce, she is not considered divorced under Jewish law until her husband issues a get. Without it, she is deemed an agunah, a “chained wife” — she cannot date or remarry within the religious community in which she was raised, and any children she has with a new husband are deemed illegitimate. While a wife can sue for divorce in a beth din, a Jewish court, and while the beth din can order the husband to issue the get, he can still refuse. For some agunot, the situation can become so dire that they turn to violence. Recently, the FBI arrested a group of Brooklyn rabbis for running a for-hire torture ring that kidnapped and tormented Jewish husbands unwilling to provide their wives with gets.
“Being an agunah is such a painful and shameful existence,” says Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that provides free legal services and support to women of any culture or religion trying to leave arranged or forced marriages. “You remain trapped as a single person in a community where there is nothing more shameful than being single.”
While there are plenty of cases in which Orthodox Jewish couples divorce without incident, for some husbands, refusing to offer a get is a way to control their wives — to extort money, to blackmail them for custody over children or, more simply, to punish them for wanting to end the marriage.
“I consider this to be the most pressing issue facing the Orthodox community in America,” says Rabbi Avi Weiss, the longtime leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York. “It’s an outrageous situation… If there is someone who is recalcitrant, they are not welcome — I have actually escorted such people out of my synagogue, which is so contrary to my work.”
“Get refusal is a form of domestic abuse, and domestic abuse is never justified,” says Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), a nonprofit in New York that helps husbands and wives secure gets amicably. Each year, ORA receives roughly 150 queries from women seeking guidance and assistance in divorcing their husbands. (In the first 36 hours after the Post story appeared, the group received a dozen phone calls.) “When dealing with contentious divorces, the first thing people say is, ‘There are two sides to every story.’ There are not two sides in abuse.”
ORA, which has handled around 500 controversial get cases since its founding in 2002, helped Dodelson organize two peaceful demonstrations outside of Weiss’ home on Staten Island, the first in June 2012 and the second a year later. The group’s tactics — a concoction of social, communal and financial pressures that involve ostracizing a husband from his community and publicizing his name online and in the media — assist women who are often unable to advocate for themselves.
“Get refusal is the last stand of men who want to hurt their wives. It’s the act of desperation: ‘You will never leave me,’” says Elana Maryles Sztokman, executive director of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. “The moment of exit is the moment of greatest danger for abused women — it’s the moment when some abusive men will take out a violent weapon and try to kill their wives. In Judaism, men don’t need to take out a gun. They can take out a get and say, ‘I will own you forever.’”
While it’s often challenging to track statistics on divorce within the Orthodox Jewish community, a 2011 study by the Mellman Group reported 462 cases of agunot in the U.S. and Canada between 2005 and 2010, suggesting a marked increase in get refusals as well as a decline in resolutions, which can take anywhere from one to five years, sometimes longer. Most of these agunot were young women with children and limited finances, trying to escape first marriages without resources or assistance. In Israel, one in three women seeking divorce is threatened with a get refusal or extortion from her husband, according to a 2013 study by Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women. Among the religious and ultra Orthodox community in Israel, that number jumps to one in every two women.
Dodelson’s decision to go public with her situation is rare for the largely private Orthodox Jewish community.
“I don’t agree with people living their lives out in the public eye like this, and using publicity to get something without everyone knowing all of the facts,” says HaDassah Sabo Milner, 40, a blogger for the Times of Israel. “You’ve got to think of the child. He’ll grow up and read vitriolic posts by each camp. He’s an innocent in all of this,” she says, adding, “I understand she’s totally desperate, and I get that, but at the end of the day, the husband has to give his divorce of his own free will.”
Milner was 32 years old and had four young children when her first marriage ended in divorce. “I was very fortunate that my ex-husband did not give me a hard time. Our marriage was over and we got it done,” she explains. But that didn’t make the experience easy. She criticizes the male-dominated divorce process as well as the men who use gets to their advantage; “withholding a get is abuse,” she says.
Not everyone in the Orthodox Jewish world criticizes Dodelson’s public plea.
“It took such guts for her to write what she did,” says Reiss, 38, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. When she was 19 years old, her parents arranged for her to marry a man she’d never met. By 27, she was unhappy and wanted out — not just of the marriage, but of the entire Orthodox Jewish world.
“I had no education and no job, and I had two kids. I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t support them or myself. I was trapped,” she says.
Reiss became the first person in her family to go to college (she graduated from Rutgers in 2007, at the age of 32). When she stopped wearing a head covering during her senior year, she says her family declared her dead. “One of my sisters told me that my [parents, two other sisters and two brothers] were discussing whether to sit shiva for me,” she says. “And I was valedictorian.”
Reiss made the rare decision to not only file for divorce in civil court, rather than religious court, but she also refused to accept a get from her husband. “Normally, women beg and have to pay money,” Reiss explains. “For a while I had rabbis calling me begging me to accept the get. They didn’t know what to do with me.”
Reiss, who now lives in in a non-Jewish suburb of New Jersey and sends her children to public school, chose to leave the Orthodox community, making it easier for her to move on with her life without a get. As she put it, “I knew I would never want to remarry in that community.” Women like Dodelson, who don’t want to sacrifice their faith for their freedom, face a harder road.
Orthodox Judaism is replete with the vestiges of bronze-age patriarchy, and change in the community takes time and consensus.
“We’ve come a long way. In some respects, Orthodox Judaism is still more progressive than fundamental religions,” says Eliyahu Fink, an Orthodox rabbi who leads the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice, Calif., referring to the fact that Orthodox Jewish women now go to graduate school and become doctors, lawyers, teachers — pretty much anything but rabbis. Still, this is a community struggling to figure out how to continue its traditions and existence in today’s high-tech, Internet-saturated, modern world.
In May 2012, around 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gathered at a religious rally at New York’s Citi Field to protest the dangers of the Internet. (Viewings were organized in Brooklyn and New Jersey neighborhoods so that women could participate remotely, separate from the men as per ultra-Orthodox tradition.) Just over a year later, the retail chain Rami Levy announced a “kosher” smartphone for the ultra-Orthodox community, complete with phone, text and email capabilities, access to pre-approved apps and limited web access (there is no Google). Recently, a Hasidic community in Brooklyn expressed outrage over the city’s new bike lanes, which brought “scantily clad” women riding through their neighborhood. This June, an Orthodox rabbinical school in New York made history by ordaining three women as halachic and spiritual leaders, called maharats (women are not permitted to be rabbis in the Orthodox community).
Divorce, however, remains the man’s prerogative. “If you’re causing someone pain — emotional, physical, sexual — that’s forbidden in the Torah,” Fink says. “If the person uses the law as a weapon, that is violating Jewish law.”
“[Progress] can’t just be about galvanizing protests for a particular person, but rather about making sure the next 500 people don’t go through this particular horror,” explains Michael Helfand, an associate professor at Pepperdine Law School and associate director of Pepperdine’s Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies.
One sign of hope for Orthodox women comes in the form of a halachic prenup, which is civilly enforceable in America and creates a financial disincentive for husbands to withhold gets.
“I will not do a wedding today without a prenuptial being signed,” says Avi Weiss, who has been using prenuptial agreements since 1983. “It’s irresponsible for any rabbi to do a wedding without one… It is the deepest expression of love: I love you so much, I want to protect you in any eventuality. If ever I am out of control, I want to make sure you are still protected.”
“We have never seen a case where a halachic prenup was properly signed and the get was withheld,” Stern says. “We need to standardize the use of the halachic prenup agreement,” he added. “It is a vaccine for the Jewish community.”
While the prenup may be an effective troubleshooting tool, it is not a solution to the endemic problem of women’s rights in Orthodox Jewish marriage and divorce proceedings. Indeed, over three years later, Dodelson still awaits her freedom from Weiss.
“I’m waiting for the email to say that Avrohom gave her the get,” says Shira Dicker, the publicist behind Dodelson’s Post article. “If we succeed here, we will have used a 21st century solution — Facebook, social media, the media — to combat a centuries-old law that is really in need of change.”
Deb Tambor’s suspected suicide leads to outcry about lack of resources for women in custody fights against haredi community. This story in The Jewish Week includes information about and from Unchained At Last.
Girls are being told to hide a metal spoon in their suitcase when they are being sent overseas and forced into marriage. That way their suitcases will set off metal detectors and compel airport security to pull them off to the side, away from their parents, where they can ask for help. This story includes mention of Unchained At Last.
The following story in the Indianapolis Star includes quotes from Unchained At Last, the only nonprofit in the US dedicated to helping women leave arranged/forced marriages.
The woman from India came to Indiana to visit family. Shortly after arriving, she discovered her mother had arranged her marriage, a not-uncommon practice in their culture.
But this marriage would turn into a violent and degrading four-month ordeal.
She was forced to have sex with her husband and do nearly round-the-clock household labor, police say. She was routinely referred to as “b—-” by her husband, uncle and aunt; and slapped and choked. Her life was threatened.
She barely ate and had to sleep on the floor without covers.
But this week, the woman will get some measure of relief when her husband, Lakhvir Singh, 28, is sentenced in Marion County Superior Court.
“I want the maximum punishment and justice to be served,” the woman told The Indianapolis Star. The Star does not generally identify victims of sexual abuse or assault. “I don’t want this to happen to any other girl. My voice can finally be heard.”
A week ago, a jury found Singh guilty of criminal deviate conduct, domestic battery, rape, sexual battery and strangulation.
Singh was found not guilty of another charge: promotion of human trafficking. He also was acquitted on separate counts of rape, deviate sexual misconduct and sexual battery.
His sentencing is scheduled for Friday, and he faces six to 20 years in prison for the most serious charges.
Singh’s lawyer, Jack Crawford, says the woman made up the allegations to get out of a marriage she didn’t like and to secure a visa for victims of human trafficking.
“She was in a marriage where she did some things she didn’t want to do and tried to get out of it,” Crawford said. “The blame here lies with the parents for forcing them both into a marriage they did not want.”
But the victim’s brother says she has the emotional and physical scars to prove the allegations.
“She is finally getting her confidence back, but it will take a long time,” said her brother, who called police when he found out about the abuse. The Star is not naming the brother to help further protect her identity.
“She had to repeat the experience at the trial, so it will be sometime before she is normal.”
Marriage a surprise
The brother was a graduate student at Purdue University when the woman came with their mother from India to visit him in May 2010.
But shortly after arriving, her mother told her she had arranged a marriage with Singh, who then lived in New Castle, Ind., said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Detective Jon Daggy.
“That is something in the culture you don’t go against the mother’s wishes about,” Daggy said.
The couple later moved to an apartment in Indianapolis. No certificate of marriage was ever filed with the State of Indiana, according to a probable cause document filed with Marion Superior Court. A religious ceremony, however, occurred at a Sikh temple in Indianapolis.
Cheryl Thomas, director of the women’s rights program at Advocates for Human Rights, a national nonprofit based in Minneapolis, said arranged marriages can be dangerous.
“This is a problem in many countries where women are forced into marriages that they don’t want to be in,” she said. “They’re vulnerable, particularly if they don’t have any education or access to employment that can give them some independence.
Once she moved into Singh’s home, the woman “never felt like a wife but was made a servant” against her will, Daggy wrote in the probable cause affidavit. She often worked from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., police said, attending to members of Singh’s family, such as an aunt, uncle and cousins who often stayed at the apartment. She prepared multiple meals per day, police said, and was required to clean all rooms of the home each day. She also did laundry for Singh and his relatives.
Singh and his family members did not call the woman by her name, the document states, but rather referred to her as “kutt” — a Punjabi word for “b—-.”
Singh threatened to kill the woman if she left his home, police said, and discouraged her from contact with the outside world. The woman does not speak English.
The woman was denied the privileges she provided others, police said. She was ordered to use detergent for washing Singh’s and his relatives’ clothing but not to use it for her own, the document states. She was forced to sleep on the floor rather than on a bed or couch, she told police, and was not even given her own blanket.
Singh regularly beat the woman, the detective wrote, when she sought to avoid having sex with him and whenever he became upset with the quality of her household work.
Unpaid servitude
Singh’s lawyer, Crawford, said the victim was able to get a T-visa, which is good for four years, because she lodged the human trafficking complaint.
But he said the jury acquitted on the human trafficking charge because they “they didn’t believe she was forced into servitude.”
“The statute says you must harbor in a condition of forced labor and involuntary servitude,” Crawford said. “But that was not the case.”
Singh did allow the woman to talk to relatives by phone, the document states, but tried to control what she told them. One of the first occasions of physical abuse, she told police, was when Singh slapped and choked her after hearing her tell her mother about her living conditions.
It was a conversation with a relative, however, that finally allowed the woman to win her escape from Singh. Seeing a phone on a couch while Singh was in a bathroom, the document states, the woman called her brother for help. Her brother called 911, the document states, and asked that police check on his sister’s welfare.
Police arranged for the woman to move to a secure location away from Singh, the document states, as they investigated her allegations.
The prosecutor’s office filed charges against Singh on Feb. 8, 2012, after a months-long investigation.
The victim’s brother says she told him her doubts about Singh early on, but he was so consumed with school at the time he didn’t heed the warnings. She told him that her future husband had acted like a “bully” on the phone.
“I now regret it,” he said. “I should have raised my voice against my mother.”
Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that helps women forced into arranged marriages, says the practice can present risks.
“Women who are brought to the U.S. as part of an arranged marriage think they are going to have a great life when they get here. But in some cases, they’re physically, sexually and emotionally abused,” she said. “They’re treated as slaves. They’re unpaid servants.”
“By no means am I saying that all arranged marriages are abusive,” Reiss said. “What I am saying is that it is much more difficult to leave an arranged marriage.”
Unchained’s first legislative proposal, to protect domestic violence victims, has been introduced in the New Jersey legislature as S2790/A3937. Please help get this important legislation passed. Details here.
“I believed he was going to kill me. He would tell me in detail exactly how he was going to do it,” Reiss said as she sat on a green leather couch in her New Jersey home, while her two teenage daughters ran in and out of the room. “He used to joke and say, ‘I’m not a wife beater, I’m a house beater,’ as if that were OK.”
Reiss said it wasn’t until speaking with a therapist outside of her community years later, that she realized this was domestic violence. After their meeting, she defied everyone she knew by enrolling in classes at Rutgers University. She shed her conservative clothing, took her two daughters, and filed for divorce.
Today, nearly 20 years later, she’s dedicated her life to helping others follow in her path. She started Unchained at Last, a nonprofit organization that helps women from New York and New Jersey — across all cultures and backgrounds — leave arranged marriages.
The group has been operational for over a year, and has over 45 divorce cases pending. According to Reiss, 70 percent of the clients are from the Orthodox Jewish community.
“I see Jewish women stay in abusive marriages because often times divorce is considered much too shameful,” Reiss said.
New York City’s five boroughs and parts of New Jersey are home to the greatest concentration of Jewish people of any metropolitan area in the United States, according to a study by the UJA-Federation of New York. And, unlike a decade ago, this population is growing: Nearly half a million Jewish people live in Orthodox households, with significantly larger families, and somewhat lower incomes.
Like Reiss, many women in these Diaspora communities feel there is an expectation to be married by age 20, though they may feel it might not be right for them. For men, the average age is 23, according to Yitzhak Berger, lead professor of Hebrew Studies at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.
Berger said there is a significantly higher amount of young girls in the community than boys, with the pools getting larger every three to four years.
“Because there are so many more girls, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure that they will be left standing,” Berger said.
In addition, Reiss said the women can also feel pressure by the matchmaker to not be the “picky girl,” they don’t want to deal with. Her ex-husband was her second match, and she already had the feeling of being a burden.
But Rachel Garfinkle, 29, a Jewish matchmaker who lived in Lakewood, New Jersey, the same town as Reiss lived after she got married, said she has never pressured a woman to marry, especially if she thought the potential groom was abusive.
“I will always tell someone, ‘If you don’t feel good about the match, talk it over with our rabbi or an advisor,’” Garfinkle said. “Most of my friends and siblings turned down the first match they were set up with.”
Aside from the struggles a woman might face when entering a marriage, there are also pressures when trying to leave it. By Jewish law, only men have the power to end a marriage by giving his wife a decree of divorce, known as a get.
If the man refuses to give his wife a religious divorce, she cannot marry again. This leaves her in a state of limbo, marking her as an agunah, or a “chained woman.” In Israel, a man can be thrown in jail for denying a get, but in the US, there is no such law.
Over the past five years, there were 450 cases of divorce refusals by men in the US and Canada, according to a 2011 study by the Mellman Group.
Knowing this, Reiss combatted the problem by getting a civil divorce, completely skipping religious courts, called the Beit Din. She is an Atheist now, but said many of her clients are not willing to part with their Jewish heritage.
Elana Sztokman, executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, said the group’s top issue is fighting the agunah problem. Sztokman said she is surprised there aren’t more people taking the same route as Reiss.
“Rabbis should be terrified, we are losing women,” she said. “They should be spending every minute trying to find a solution to the agunah.”
The organization feels the best solution would be to have the Beit Din courts introduce forms of annulment, where a woman can declare the union void based on an error in the creation of the marriage. Meaning, if she had she known he was violent or manipulative, she never would have married him.
In the future, Reiss hopes to turn her group into a national organization. In April, Unchained at Last got its first big break, with the successful divorce of their first client, a Pakistani woman from the Bronx.
Even though Reiss said she feels her life is complete without religion, severing ties with her entire family was not taken lightly.
“There are a lot of times that it’s just incredibly sad and painful for me that I’m so alone in this world,” Reiss said as she gazed around the room at the home she bought completely on her own. “But when it’s 90 degrees outside and my daughters can wear a pair of shorts and a tank top, they say, ‘Thank you Mommy.’”
