"Should I go to other Rabbis … or should I go to court": Eastern European Jewish women and Marital Litigation, 1900–1920

Abstract

In March 1906, a woman, signing as “the friendless woman of Lynn, Mass.,” reached out to the Yiddish Forverts’s advice columnist Abraham Cahan to decry her forced divorce, and the devastating financial hurdles that had resulted from it. The young mother of a two-year old and a one-month-old baby described, in A Bintel Brief, how the process of spousal desertion had unfolded. After she and her husband mutually agreed upon a divorce, the couple turned to a rabbi in Providence, Rhode Island, to dissolve the marriage.2 When the rabbi refused to proceed with the ceremony, rebuking the couple for “leaving a living orphan,” the husband tried his luck with a different religious authority, this time with more success. By then, however, the wife no longer agreed to a divorce. Yet, she was taken to the other rabbi by force, and divorced against her will. Lured by the twenty-five-dollar bill that the husband had placed in front of him, the second rabbi hurried to prepare the get (bill of divorce). Following this procedure, the man disappeared, leaving the “friendless woman” and their children entirely destitute. Consequently, the newly divorced woman wrote to the Forverts in search of the financial support necessary for her survival: “Now there remains for me to ask some advice of you, as to what I should do.