A man from the village of Kiryas Joel in New York, who was married to two women at the same time, on Tuesday granted a divorce to his first wife after some 10 years of refusal.
The man, who separated from his first wife over a decade ago, refused to give her a religious divorce and officially end their marriage according to Jewish law. The man claimed that he had received special permission from 100 rabbis to marry a second wife, a Jewish legal workaround. Thus, while leaving his first wife an agunah, or chained wife, he remarried a few weeks ago.
His marriage to a second wife while he was married to another caused a stir in Israel, with echoes in Jerusalem.
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Hasidic man and his wife, for illustaration
(Illustration: Created using artificial intelligence)
The man - an ultra-Orthodox Jew, who is not a Satmar Hasid himself, but lives in a Hasidic center, wasordered by the Hasidic Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum, to give his first wife a divorce.
"Here in Kiryas Joel lives a man who married his second wife before he divorced his first wife, and his claim is that he has the permission of a hundred rabbis. I have learned that some of the rabbis have already retracted their signature after learning that the entire permit is based on false lies, some have retracted In writing and some orally even before he married his second wife," Teitelbaum said.
Prior to the public threat, the rabbi tried to convince the refuser to decide to grant the divorce peacefully.
In recent weeks, the Rebbe heard that the man had begun to pray regularly in the kollel headed by the Rebbe's son-in-law, Shimon Zeev Meisels. Teitelbaum called his son-in-law in recent days and ordered him to remove the husband from the study hall. The son-in-law tried to soften the Rebbe, who allowed him to try to convince the husband to grant a divorce through persuasion and dialogue.
After several conversations between the head of the kollel and the recalcitrant husband, he agreed to grant a divorce, but ultimately retracted due to stubborn reluctance. This led Teitelbaum to stand in the central Beit Midrash in Kiryas Joel and for the first time publicly address the painful affair.
The incident took on an international flavor after Rabbi Avraham Katz, who had supported the controversial second marriage, attempted to sneak out of Israel despite a court-ordered travel ban. He was arrested at the airport and is under house arrest.
Ultimately, on Tuesday the man in the U.S. relented and the get was granted. "We are happy that after the woman was agunah for 10 years, we were able to obtain the long-awaited get within a short period of only three months. This was done through determination and creativity that created a precedent-setting ruling that will help in many agunah cases," according to the woman's attorney Elad Zamir.