10/22/13

What are the Agunah Chronicles?

What is "The Agunah Chronicles"? I know what "The Vagina Monologues" is. It's an episodic play written by Eve Ensler which ran off broadway.

"The Agunah Chronicles" is a supposed "forthcoming book" that does not appear on Amazon when you do a search for it.

Don't you just cringe when someone makes claims about a "forthcoming book" that are not verifiable and they get that published in the Times?

Anyhow, "The Agunah Chronicles" "authors" wrote a letter to the New York Times . Here is what appeared in the Times:
The scandalous situation of kidnapping and torturing recalcitrant husbands who withhold a Jewish divorce, a “get,” from their wives is a result of the Orthodox rabbinate’s failure to use the compassionate and creative solutions long available under Jewish law to free women from dead marriages (“U.S. Accuses 2 Rabbis of Kidnapping Husbands for a Fee,” news article, Oct. 11).

Pious agunot, women desperate to be free of their husbands, many of whom are violent, criminals or pedophiles, are vulnerable to corrupt rabbis who tell them that yielding to extortion or torturing their husbands is the only way they can ever be free to remarry and raise a family.

Opportunistic thugs, sometimes mythologized as heroes, run amok because mainstream Orthodox rabbis insist that even violent and degenerate husbands retain control over their wives. Every rabbi who fails to use the peaceful avenues available under Jewish law to free agunot opens the way for this shocking disgrace of the Jewish community.

SUSAN ARANOFF
RIVKA HAUT
Brooklyn, Oct. 11, 2013

The writers are co-authors of the forthcoming book “The Agunah Chronicles,” a nonfiction account of helping agunot struggle for freedom in rabbinical courts in the United States.
I don't think the thugs who beat up the husbands are the "corrupt rabbis" here. It's the other ones -- those who deny a woman the right to divorce her husband. But let's not quibble. Anyway... where can I order the so-called "forthcoming book"?

UPDATE: I'M TOLD BY A FRIEND THAT I OVERSIMPLIFIED THIS PROBLEM AND MY VIEWS ARE MARGINALIZED.

I said in reply: Thanks for your assessment but on the contrary, the opposite is the truth. My view is mainstream.

Each day that rabbis claim this is a complicated problem that has no easy solution, they marginalize themselves and the orthodox community even more from the rest of the Jewish world and from the rest of the civilized societies of the world.

It is time to accept that women have the right to divorce their husbands and to enact that as our process and stop the marginalization of Judaism.

My hope is that now - after the publicity of the current scandal - civil courts will actively intervene in the process and issue instructions that a woman be given a divorce by rabbinic authority. And there are rabbis who will do just that, thus, by the intervention of the civil authorities, ending the current oppressive system.

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