Episode 146: Flatbush Girl Takes on Get Refusal [Transcript]

[theme music plays] 

Nahanni Rous: 00:12

Hi, it's Nahanni Rous. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

Adina Sash: 00:23

I may be preparing for yontif, just like everyone else. It's a very busy season. But if you thought the campaign to free Yides has slowed down or paused in any way, think again!

Nahanni: 00:37

Adina Sash, aka Flatbush Girl, is on a mission to free agunot, which literally means "chained women."—Orthodox women caught in marriages because their husbands refuse to grant them a get or Jewish divorce. Without a get, religious women are unable to remarry or move on with their lives. The organization Chochmat Nashim estimates that there are two to three thousand agunot worldwide. In the past five years, Adina has helped 50 women obtain their get.

Adina: 01:09

We are gonna get this get no matter what, no matter how long it takes. And the longer it takes, the longer we have an opportunity to really highlight the very terrible abusive situation that many of these victims of coercive control fall into.

Nahanni: 01:25

Adina takes an unorthodox approach to the problem of agunot. Using her platform of 100,000 Instagram followers, she pressures get refusers and their enablers, calling them out by name.

Adina: 01:38

I'm sorry, Shulem Abe Deutsch, you are on the wrong side of history right now. I mean, you can still teshuva—you can still be the hero and bring Meir Berkowitz for a get.

Nahanni: 01:46

Sometimes she takes the fight off the screen and into the streets. She'll go to an offender's religious neighborhood and park a truck with a giant photo of him projected on its side. She shouts through a megaphone as neighbors gather to watch.

[sounds of Adina and other women yelling]

Nahanni: For her most controversial campaign, which she dubbed "Get Naked," Adina asked her followers to post risque pictures online to draw attention to the cause—pretty shocking in religious communities that prize women's modesty as a central value. 

Adina herself grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, home to a large ultra-Orthodox community. She attended Beis Yaakov religious girls' schools and married straight out of high school. She got her first social media account in 2018 and started posting videos about Orthodox life. Some were funny and slightly subversive, like her jumping into a swimming pool, fully dressed and in her shadow or wig. A lot of her friends thought she was going astray just by posting clothed images of herself online. Now her "Get Naked" campaign has further alienated her from the community where she still lives with her husband and children.

Adina: 03:12

I still identify uh vehemently as an Orthodox from Jew. I would like to consider myself a Yiddishe mama and, you know, and a Jewish wife and running a Jewish home and a kosher kitchen and a big Shabbos table. I mean, I'm hosting like over 25 people for Sukkot. Um, and at the same time being able to say, like, hard stop on certain things that strip women of their bodily autonomy.

Nahanni: 03:46

In this episode of Can We Talk?, Adina discusses get refusal, which, according to some advocates, affects as many as one in three women who are navigating divorce in an Orthodox beit din, or rabbinic court. Adina explains her provocative methods and why the issue of agunot is much bigger than the individual get refusers. 

[theme music fades]

Nahanni:

Was there a moment when you were inspired to take on the issue of get refusal? Did you have a personal connection to somebody who was struggling with it?

Adina: 04:19

You know, the narrative for myself when I look back is, you know, I had this very robust following. I had a lot of engagement. I was doing a lot of promotions for products or services that had an aspect of, like, female empowerment to it, but I didn't feel fulfilled from the work I was doing. I remember, you know, really sort of like reaching out, like seeking God's guidance and sort of surrendering and saying, listen, I have this big platform, I don't know what to do with it. I want to give it in service to your people and to your women and to your Torah and to your halakha, but I don't know where to go next. And if you guide me and give me success, I'll dedicate it for that cause. That was sort of a changing moment. 

Very, very shortly thereafter, um, a rabbi who I think of very much as a very strong mentor of mine who has taught me a lot of the actual halakhos of get refusal. He came to me and he said, Listen, there's this very severe case of get refusal. This woman is trapped for 10 years. Um, no one has been able to get this yet. No one can free her. Like hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent. The cleverest minds have been, you know, used as resources for this woman, and there's just no way to free her. And I adopted the case and I adopted it wholeheartedly like go, go, go, go, go, go, go. We freed her within three months.

Nahanni: 05:50

Can you explain for a non-Orthodox audience how this works, what the issue of get refusal is all about?

Adina: 05:59

Get refusal has always existed as long as there's been a kesuba, because when there's a contract that unifies a husband and wife, you also need a dissolution contract. If the kesuba is not dissolved, she remains his lawful wedded wife until the dissolution of the kesuba. 

According to halakha, you're actually allowed to physically coerce the refuser into giving a get. You are supposed to physically coerce until he relents, and that is part of our heritage. Now, the problem is that we cannot practice that way anymore. And there has not been a rabbinic will that has motivated them to come up with another way to bypass a hijacked will from a husband. And so we have to revert to either legal mechanisms, social activism mechanisms, um, and anything that's, you know, within the coordinates of the law, which is a very challenging thing for an advocate to do when you're dealing with invisible forms of religious coercive control that is protected by multiple layers of social, rabbinical, and political enablement.

Nahanni: 07:11

So your tactic has been publicizing these individual cases, essentially shaming the men into giving the women a get. Is that correct?

Adina: 07:23

Yes, that's definitely accurate. But where the details of that are a little deeper is that get refusal very often is not about the get refuser. The get refuser, of course, I'm not absolving him of the abuse he's doing, but very rarely will you find one man standing get refuser. Those are very, very, very rare cases. Those are very hard cases. I've dealt with cases like that, but in the majority of get refusal cases, the get refuser is the symptom of a network that is giving him encouragement, whether it's passive or active, to continue doing what he's doing. 

Nahanni: So it might help to hear a specific story. 

Adina: So right now I'm engaged in a very, very difficult get refusal case. Um, it's a case of Yides, which is the, you know, the Yiddish version of Yehudis. Um, she is trying to escape her marriage for a long time. She's married at this point for over 20 years. Already in year ten, she really wanted out and was systemically pressured back into the abusive dynamic, whether through community leaders, familial pressure, community pressure. 

There is one primary individual who has been enabling the husband's get refusal, who uh masked himself as an advocate to help repair the marriage. But the campaign to free her is under the impression that the get refuser is merely a puppet. And he is a puppet for the ego of this community organizer who's very politically connected, which is why he thinks he's completely immune to pressure. Um, he's very connected to the Mamdani administration, he's connected to Kathy Hochul, the governor. Um, he's connected to a lot of judges, and he uses his power and position. And we've had multiple witnesses come forward who have alleged that he has done the same tactics with them. He comes as someone who is going to help the women escape, but really just gets closer insight into what's going on for her psychologically and emotionally, and then exploits those weaknesses with the get refuser to keep her trapped because we can't have women in Hasidic Judaism just leaving their marriages when it's just not convenient for them anymore. The system thrives on marriages come hell or high water.

Nahanni: 10:01

So you're saying that this husband, you think it's not that he doesn't want to grant the get, he's being somehow pressured into keeping her in this marriage.

Adina: 10:13

He's being pressured and encouraged and protected and given a sense of, you know, hold on a little longer. The campaign to free Yides is gonna run out of energy, they're gonna run out of resources, maybe Yides will come back again. It's really the same mechanism of action that's involved in any sort of senseless abuse where there's control and there's a victim. There's dozens of cases, like I mean, I've myself worked on dozens of cases. There's a main enabler or a network of enablers. Um, the kickback they get is a sense of integralness, a sense of "I control when that woman's vagina is available for reproduction or not. I control whether she can move on with her life or not. I control when this marriage is done or not." And it gives men a great sense of power and pleasure to see women um be battered in more than just physical violence or sexual violence, but in the their ability to move on and find new partners and potentially reproduce and have new children. It's also a very big form of reproductive abuse. 

Nahanni: 

Is there a financial component to it for some people? 

Adina: 

Absolutely. There's definitely a financial component. Um, in the last case I worked on that was very high profile, that case um did have a financial component. He was only willing to give the get if he got a certain wire payment, and um, a benefactor in the community swooped in and made that wire transaction. And it was the final motivation that the husband needed. Um, and sometimes when you have multiple enablers, there's a financial kickback for them as well.

Nahanni: 12:03

So it's really a form of extortion.

Adina: 12:06

Absolutely.

Nahanni: 12:07

You are also paid a retainer to take these cases, right? Um, so who pays you?

Adina: 12:14

So not every case is fully paid. I make the executive decision on whether or not this is a case that needs to be pro bono or something I need to be compensated for. Generally, it's the support system and the support network of the woman, uh, not the woman herself. And um, in situations where there's like an extreme need, I have worked pro bono. And in other cases where I've been retained for nice amounts of money, I ultimately found myself in court needing to defend myself against frivolous defamation claims and um in the red over $150,000 on legal. So I'm deeply in the red on this kind of activism.

Nahanni: 12:55

Let's go to the campaign that got you some New York Times attention—the one in which you and other women posted pictures of parts of your body online. Can you describe this and what inspired you to start that campaign?

Adina: 13:16

Sure. So I have a master's in medieval literature and I'm very much inspired by, you know, different stories that have helped women in the past with movements of liberation. You know, when I initially did my mikveh strike for the Malkie Berkowitz case a few years ago, I was very inspired by Lysistrata, in which women went on strike and would not um have sex with their husbands until they facilitated peace and the war ended. Um, and then with this particular, you know, campaign of sharing nudes, I was very inspired by in the Hanukkah story, Hannah, you know, the sister of the Maccabees, you know, she held a protest with her body because women were being given to the army general. Their maiden had—their virginity was given to the army general, and then they were free to marry their husbands. And the men of the community said they were powerless and there was nothing they can do. And she got naked, and they were like, "How can you do that with your body? It's so immodest." And she's like, "If only you would have that level of dismay over the fact that me and my Jewish sisters um are losing our virginity to the general." And it sparked a revolution. 

And I mean, the story goes that, you know, women got their liberty back on who to have sex with first. Um, so I was very inspired by that, you know, using one's body and nudity as a form of protest. I think it shows a certain level of desperation, but I think that in that desperation, if you do it with a lot of confidence and you do it with camaraderie, it can ultimately be counterintuitively very dignified. 

And I think it was an incredible movement. It was wonderful. We got hundreds of photos, thousands of photos, women standing in solidarity, women who were part of the community, women who've had pictures like this on their phone that they have such pride over, but were always too scared to share it here or there. And they felt like, wow, they were able to do it to free their Jewish sisters and spark that awareness. 

Nahanni: 

So who participated? 

Adina: 

Women from all different backgrounds, Orthodox women, Hasidish women, Lubavitch women, and then, of course, allies on the fringes who maybe are comfortable going to the beach in a bikini, but maybe would never have shared it in protest with their faces.

Nahanni: 15:43

And what was the idea behind it? How is it a protest?

Adina: 15:48

Because it creates conversation and it creates provocative attention towards an issue that is particularly a form of sexual violence on women. Get refusal is sexual violence. It's a forced chastity belt onto women, where they are limited to when and where and how they can continue to sexually reproduce. And the executive decision-making is held within the husband and the beis din. Sometimes you have situations where the husband is ready and the beis din perpetuates certain levels of gridlock where they are purposefully misconstruing halakha because they also get a sense of power over controlling the exit for women, even if they know that she's being abused. For example, with Yides' case, she was coerced by the beis din to drop a restraining order that was protecting her and her children. And they said, "We'll get you your get if you drop the restraining order." And she dropped the restraining order and it's a year later, and now her kids are just vulnerable to more violence, and she's still trapped. Um, and so this was a way of kind of whistleblowing and saying, like, "If we're really just sexual objects to you, then here are your sexual objects."

Nahanni: 17:05

And so is the idea that the authorities will see this and this this will be too much for them, so they will relent. Like, "Stop showing us the pictures and we'll comply with your demands." Is that the idea?

Adina: 17:19

I think that's one component of it, yes. In a certain way, it is, you know, a form of, like, religious retaliation um against their warfare. So it's like a defensive positioned attack against their terrorism. And it's also a little bit of a threat to the um powers in the beis din system to basically say, "You are determining when we are free and when we are not free. But the more we align together and we use our bodies in protest, we may no longer actually care about what you have to say about our freedom. Our body is our own and we will use it as we see fit. And if you don't protect us and you use the get to continue abusing us, we'll just become more and more empowered with our bodies to do with it what we want."

Nahanni: 18:10

And do you think that it is effective?

Adina: 18:13

Of course I think it's effective. Yes. Adina is free now, and she wasn't free for six or seven years. She was tormented in court for six or seven years. And within two, three weeks of us doing the nudes campaign, um, the news had spread everywhere, and we were able to rally more allies and more crowdsourcing support and more accountability and pressure. And that is how we ultimately got a get, plus, with the lubrication of the benefactors wired to the get refuser.

Nahanni: 18:46

So some people have noted that the images are pornographic, and even if people agree with the cause, they might not agree that these ends justify the means, since the images are, you know, breaking the bounds of modesty, which is so important in the Orthodox world. And in one writer's words, "The images are turning women's bodies into protest signs and kind of weaponizing women's bodies." So, what is your response to that?

Adina: 19:19

So, my first response is these are photos that were submitted to us by adults. Um, every single person I spoke to, I said, "Please, you know, send me a voice note. I want to hear a little bit about why you're partaking, what motivated you to join in on this." I didn't just take anonymously submitted photos unless I either heard their voice or knew what their name was or understood their background or their motivation. And I weeded through every single one of them myself. And I did not allow many of them through that I either thought were revenge porn from exes or just things off the internet. Um, I did my very best to filter through and make sure that everyone who was partaking was doing so with a sense of empowerment and who were of age to share. 

Um, porn or using one's body in whatever way they see fit, as long as you're abiding by the laws and you're not a predator, that is the most empowered state a woman can have with her body. Modesty is only beautiful because women are opting into it. If modesty is something that is being followed because women are afraid not to, or women are pressured of what will happen if they do not, then that is just another form of abuse. And so to give women an outlet in which they can uh anonymously share their bodies in protest, to me gives an overwhelming amount of autonomy to women. So I disagree with the criticism.

Nahanni: 20:52

Here's a sentence from that same article that was attacking your methods" "If the complaint is that women are not being treated as full human beings within the system, why answer by making women's bodies the center of the spectacle?"

Adina: 21:10

Because the whole process of a get is all about women's bodies. The get is the permission slip for the woman to use her body in a mating, sexual, reproductive manner. And so when that is taken away, the way to uh showcase that ultimately the power lies within women and they are not always going to fall in line is by reminding the gatekeepers that at the end of the day, my body is mine, and the choices I make with my body are mine.

Nahanni: 21:51

You mentioned a few minutes ago the terrorism of the enablers. Do you consider yourself in a war with the establishment?

Adina: 22:04

100%. Yes. I'm in a war with the beis din system. There's no auditing. There's no independent body. There's no transparency in the ways anything is run. Women are coerced into signing legally binding arbitration agreements. There's no female representation within the beis din system. Even to have a female advocate with a woman is still considered highly controversial. The very halakhos that would help a woman defend herself against the ways she's being abused are actually obscured from her because we are in the Beis Yaakov system, women are not taught Gemara. So we aren't even given a frame of reference for the literature we need to know and quote in order to advocate for ourselves in beis din. It's a scam. Beis din in many ways is a scam. Not every beis din, not every dayan, not every arbitrator, but in many cases they are extensions of the coercive control that the husband and his enablers are creating. And it is a war because it's a war against the very regulatory body that oversees women's freedom.

Nahanni: 23:18

So I'm wondering what you think about the efforts to kind of fight this from within a halakhic system, like the halakhic prenup, for example, which as far as I understand it, gives more of the power to the beis din. But what you're saying is that that can also be an enabling body. So what do you think of that as a solution to this problem?

Adina: 23:43

So what I love about the halakhic prenup is that it's an amazing way to filter out what the issues might end up being in the event of a divorce. You know, if a woman wants to sign one when she's engaged and the fiance doesn't want to, um, you can already start to spot the red flags that might exist for the future. Like he might say things like, "I want to sign it, but my mother doesn't let me," or "I'm okay with signing it, but my rabbi doesn't let me." A woman who says she needs one and then sees she cannot get one will very likely be saving herself from a severe situation of gut abuse. 

Um and many women don't end up getting one and they still go through with the marriages. And I mean, I have a case right now in Antwerp. Tzivy Freilich was waiting for a gut for many years and she was begging for a halakhic prenup. She sounded the alarm with the rabbis and they promised her they were taking care of it. And her own kalla teacher said, "Don't worry, we're taking care of it. And she was under the impression that it was taken care of, and in the end, there was nothing. And now she's a severe victim of coercive control.

Nahanni: 24:46

Are most of the women that you work with also going through the secular court system to try to get a divorce? A civil divorce. 

Adina: 

Yeah. 

Nahanni: 

How do these two systems butt up against each other?

Adina: 24:59

Very often the get abuser can masquerade as just a very highly concerned parent, and the courts don't really understand that at the same time, he's holding his wife hostage. And so the ways in which his invisible abuse can be, you know, explained to protect the wife and the children is very hard to give over. You need expert witnesses, you need a very savvy lawyer, you need a judge who can see through, you know, these invisible levels of extortion.

Nahanni: 25:32

I had assumed that it would be a lot easier for most women to get a civil divorce.

Adina: 25:38

These kinds of perpetrators are very good at delay and avoidance and obscuring things. So just like they don't want to relent on the religious divorce, they often don't want to relent on the civil divorce either. You know, in many situations, women are—like the judges will say, Okay, he owes this amount in child support, this amount in alimony, and you get the house, and he has to pay the tuitions" and blah, blah, blah. So be it. And then he comes and he says, "Okay, you want your get? I want you to release me from all the things that the judges said."  And a lot of them will hold the get as an ace up their sleeve, so that whatever family court rules, they can override it using the get by making the woman have to pick between her bodily autonomy and safety and what's in the best interest of her kids from a financial or from a visitation uh schedule dynamic. It's their way of making sure they have the upper hand at all times.

Nahanni: 26:44

And if a woman wants to remain and remarry within the Hasidic community, clearly the civil divorce and the get are necessary.

Adina: 26:55

The get is the most necessary, because she can't get married or date anyone. You can't even have a coffee with someone. That would be like you're a married woman and you're being spotted having an intimate coffee with someone! You're a slut.

Nahanni: 27:09

Do you find that this is an off-ramp for a lot of women who end up leaving the community? Either because they can't obtain their get and they just need the civil divorce and then get out, or because the whole process is so alienating.

Adina: 27:24

Yes, absolutely. And that's part of the ways the community and the establishment enables what the get refuser wants. The get refuser wants to strip the wife of all of her, anything she values. And so, yeah, many women, when they leave, the get refusers are like, "Great, got that one done too.: And the communities are also like "Well, good. She uh, you know, she didn't listen to what we told her to do" or "She was a menace to begin with" or "She never really cared about Judaism. If she could leave—even though she's been suffering for seven, eight years—I mean, she must have not really been that devout to begin with."

Nahanni: 28:01

How uh has your activism around this affected your own marriage?

Adina: 28:09

It's been extremely, extremely hard. I have a lot of haters who just want to see my marriage destroyed. In the last year, there have been the strongest rumors ever that I was already divorced, and people who were claiming that they had evidence and people who claim that they knew and that they spoke to the people who were present at the get ceremony, and that I'm a hundred percent divorced. And so even if you have a very strong relationship and a strong partnership, um, it can take a toll. You know, a lot of people make a lot of assumptions because I'm extremely strong-willed. You know, I can be very belligerent when it comes to these victims and advocating for them. And so they make assumptions that my husband is trapped in a dead marriage and my husband is the victim of coercive control, um, and that everyone needs to band together to free him from me. It's very, very debilitating for us. 

Nahanni: 

Is he supportive of what you do? 

Adina: 

I wouldn't be able to do this if he wasn't supportive. And sometimes I choose my activism over the relationship. Um, and that's part of the cost of advocacy. That's why most people are not advocates—because the people around them can't handle it. And I'm very grateful that he has a very high stamina for uh, you know, for what my work entails.

Nahanni: 29:33

So later in this season of Can We Talk?, we are interviewing some Jewish matchmakers. Um so, as someone who thinks so much about how to help women get out of marriages, what questions would you have for them?

Adina: 29:54

Well, I would say, do they know what a halakhic prenup is and how it works and what its strengths and vulnerabilities are? Do they understand the mechanisms of action and the ways in which it can help the couple in the future to have a peaceful co-release of their marriage? Do they empower women to obtain their halakhic prenups? The next thing I would ask is do they ask husbands who are from divorced relationships to explain a little bit about what the divorce get process was like? Did they give a get—from when the couple was physically separated to when he gave a get, how long did it take? Maybe your antenna should go up if it took over a year. 

Um, and then I would also ask them, do they ever ask the husbands, "Did you ever have a siruv against you? A siruv is an excommunication document that commands the community to quarantine from this individual until he either submits to beis din or gives a get. And if they don't know what a siruv is and they don't understand how it works, then they're probably just part of the system of enablement because they're making matches without thinking about the escape routes that the woman might need in a situation of abuse. 

And I just think that um the more we can just empower women to see themselves as not just, you know, made from the rib of their husbands, but as their own individual sovereign being, uh, the more we can empower women not to tolerate abuse at the first sign of it and to seek, you know, appropriate help as fast as possible. 

Nahanni: Is there a systemic solution that you can imagine? 

Adina: I cannot imagine a systemic solution because I don't think there's a solution to misogyny. That would be like asking, do you think there's a systemic solution to misogyny? I don't think so. I think that the victimization and objectification of women and the bodily control over women is something that will be forever. 

Very often, when I try to think of  ways to escape this little role I've created for myself because it can sometimes be very isolating and it's a prison in and of itself. And when I try to think of escaping it, I just think, but if I don't do it, no one else will.

[Theme music plays]

Nahanni: 32:16

Adina Sash is also known on Instagram as Flatbush Girl. There are other organizations working on this issue. One of them, ORA, the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, helps hundreds of agunot each year to obtain a get. For more information about the issue of get refusal, check out getora.org. That's g-e-t-o-r-a.org. Also check out the Can We Talk? episode, "Fighting for Israel's Chained Women," about the unique issues facing agunot in Israel at jwa.org/canwetalk or on your favorite podcast app. 

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. 

I'm Nahanni Rous. Until next time.

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