‘Chained’ women in the spotlight
The plight of Jewish women who are refused a religious divorce by their husbands will be highlighted in Set Me Free, an ABC-TV documentary airing on July 10.
THE plight of Jewish women who are refused a religious divorce by their husbands will be highlighted in Set Me Free, an ABC-TV documentary airing this Sunday (July 10).
Part of a Compass series titled Divorce According To God, which looks at divorce issues in a number of faith traditions, the episode on Jewish wives examines how they are left in limbo because they cannot remarry without a gett (religious bill of divorce).
Producer Tracey Spring focused on two Jewish women. Viewers will meet 93-year-old Doreen Beckwith, Australia’s oldest agunah, whose husband Victor mysteriously disappeared 63 years ago, leaving her deserted in a remote Queensland town with a toddler and a newborn baby. Is he alive or dead? She needs proof he is alive to secure her gett.
“It’s a horrid place to be,” reflected Beckwith in Set Me Free, “because you’re neither this nor that. You’re not a wife, you’re not a divorcee in the Jewish sense, so you are in limbo.”
Her story is interwoven with that of Lana Krain, whose husband left without a word 17 years ago, leaving her with two small boys.
“I did ask for a gett at the time,” Krain told viewers. “He said, ‘that’s fine, I want 50,000 American dollars’.”
Spring also interviewed people who have made it their mission to help these women. Unchain My Heart is made up mainly of representatives from Melbourne’s Jewish women’s organisations, who meet regularly to raise awareness of the agunah crisis.
One women’s organisation spearheading the fight for agunot in Australia is the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia. In her interview for the program, Susie Ivany, the NCJWA’s vice-president and vice-chair of its Status of Women in Jewish Law committee, spoke of a universal Jewish problem.
Ivany, who is strongly involved with Unchain My Heart, told the TV program: “We are all affected by the laws. It doesn’t matter which denomination or where we come from, and we come together because we see an injustice.”
Another member of Unchain My Heart is Talya Faigenbaum, a family lawyer who is a trailblazer within the legal system for representing agunot. She recently presented a case that gett refusal constituted a form of “family violence” and, in a landmark ruling, the magistrate agreed.
Interviewed for the documentary, Faigenbaum said the magistrate’s “exact words were that the gett refusal itself was the ultimate exercise of dominance and control”.
Spring, a Sydney Jewish filmmaker, told The AJN she had proposed Jewish concepts such as a close-up look at the Beth Din (Jewish religious court) to ABC-TV in the past, and then she hit on the idea of probing the agunah issue.
“I’m always on the lookout for interesting Jewish stories with a local theme. A while back, we pitched a story about the Beth Din, so that was always on my horizon, and I’d heard about the agunah problem.”
Spring then read fellow documentary maker John Safran’s landmark Fairfax Media article about Jewish chained women last year, after which a friend referred her to Unchain My Heart in Melbourne, “and it all kind of snowballed”, she said.
“I thought it was such an intoxicating story. Then I met Doreen, Australia’s oldest agunah, and she’s a really magnificent woman and it’s quite extraordinary what she’s been through in her life, and the strength that she’s shown.
“I had a mission in my head that we would try to get Doreen her gett,” said Spring. “She’d fought all these years.
“At that point I didn’t quite understand the rules about the gett. I realised we have to prove whether her husband is alive or dead,” she said.
What followed was a painstaking investigation and a lot of sleuthing to try to uncover the trail of the mysterious husband.
In the process, Spring developed a strong working relationship with the rabbis of the Melbourne and Sydney Beth Dins and their efforts to try to stamp out withholding of getts within a halachic framework.
“They were in communication with rabbis in Israel who are experts in this area,” she pointed out.
“This is a problem that Jews have struggled with for centuries.”
Set Me Free is episode one of Divorce According to God and screens on Compass on ABC, Sunday, July 10, at 6.30pm.
PETER KOHN
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