UNITED STATES
Newsweek
BY ABIGAIL JONES / APRIL 8, 2015
“Basically, what we are going to be doing is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get,” Rabbi Mendel Epstein told two potential clients. It was August 14, 2013, and he was sitting in his home in Lakewood, New Jersey, with a young Orthodox Jewish woman and her brother. She had sought out Epstein because she desperately wanted to divorce her husband, who was refusing to give her a get, the document that formally dissolves a marriage under Jewish law.
In Orthodox Judaism, only husbands can give gets, and while most do, those who refuse wield enormous power over their wives. Even with a civil divorce decree in hand, a woman is not divorced in the Orthodox Jewish world until her husband gives her a get. Until then, she is an agunah, a “chained” woman. If she falls in love and decides to remarry without the get, she would be considered an adulteress, and her children from that union would be shunned.
Epstein, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, and Lakewood, had a reputation for facilitating divorces. On that August day a couple of years ago, he explained to the woman and her brother how he would persuade her husband to give her a get. He mentioned a team of “tough guys” who could torture her husband with electric cattle prods, handcuffs and karate and suffocate him using plastic bags. “I guarantee you that if you’re in the van, you’d give a get to your wife,” he said. “Hopefully, there won’t even be a mark on him.”
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