One of the most painful problems facing our community is the "Agunah" issue. An Agunah is a "chained" woman: she is legally married, but her husband has either gone missing, or is unwilling to grant her a divorce "get" even when the marriage has collapsed.
She is put in the untenable situation of being unable to move forward with her life; she cannot marry anyone else, since she is still tied to her missing or recalcitrant husband. Throughout the generations, our rabbis have worked diligently to relieve the plight of a woman whose husband has disappeared. They operated on the principle: "in the case of an agunah, the rabbis find leniencies"; they were willing to suspend the usual laws of evidence in ascertaining that the missing husband had died.
During the years following the Holocaust, for example, rabbis went to great efforts to find ways of permitting female survivors to remarry, on the assumption that their former husbands had indeed been murdered by the Nazis. In the case of recalcitrant husbands, rabbinic tradition also manifests tremendous concern for the plight of women.
It has various provisions that enable the rabbinic courts to punish such men; and in rare cases, rabbinic courts have found legal provisions for annulling the original marriage so that the woman would not need a "get".
In recent times, though, rabbinic courts generally have been reluctant to act forcefully in cases where husbands refuse to grant a "get" to their estranged wives. Such men use the "get" as a means of vindictive punishment of their wives; some use it as a bargaining chip in a divorce settlement, demanding that the wife pay a large sum for the "get" or that she give up property rights or child custody rights.
