UNITED STATES
COLive
By Yehudis Smith
Although the latest op-ed on COLlive.com about Agunahs was so atrocious that it was actually… well, funny, I still can’t shake this feeling of total disillusionment.
Today, I sat reading this sorry excuse for an op-ed by Aliza, and I felt my body respond in such a visceral way that I surprised myself. Even though I have moved on wholly and completely from my experience as a chained woman, my first instinct was to feel attacked, ridiculed, shamed.
I got married to my first husband almost 9 years ago to the day. The mistreatment started at my wedding and for the next 7 months my life was a living hell. I knew from the first day of my new life with him that my marriage was over, and yet I stayed until I couldn’t take it any longer. I still remember how I felt when I called my mother to tell her I was leaving him, and the look in his eyes when I actually left. I thought that would be the hardest moment… but I was wrong.
The next 11 months shocked my system: from my friends who couldn’t understand what went wrong… my rabbi telling me to go home and make a nice dinner and get pregnant instead… and then telling me that it was “normal and reasonable” for a man to delay in giving his wife a gett… to the bais din system failing me day in and day out. I know that I am lucky that my prison sentence only lasted about a year (and a few thousand dollars); many women are chained for quite a lot longer than that. But to all the naysayers out there, including the author of the latest article, let me explain to you how it feels to be chained to a marriage you want no part of:
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