Behind every Agunah fighting her way to freedom is a mother sitting at home and wringing her hands.
I was that mother. Through a great miracle, my daughter received her get last year. Her experience as an agunah affected our family in ways that we never imagined. It’s painful for me to write about, and I’m sure it will be painful for others to read. The good news is that the episode is in her past, and we pray that her future looks bright. This is our story.
My daughter got married in 2012. My husband and I saw red flags, but they got brushed under the carpet. There was a beautiful, over-the-top wedding followed by a move across the world and a pregnancy a few months later. We worried from afar, but we tried to believe it was the fairytale that it seemed to be. Like every mother, I wanted all of my daughter’s dreams to come true, and her grand start at her wedding truly made her husband appear as her knight in shining armor.
The estrangement began with the birth of their first child. I guess that’s pretty typical in abusive marriages, but it came as a big shock to us. I literally couldn’t understand what was happening. Was my daughter rejecting me, her mother, at this important time in her life? Was there something I did? Did her husband just hate me? Couldn’t we talk it out? According to him, she was too busy, it was a bad time, maybe in a few weeks. And so the cycle began.
Over the next few years came the birth of their next two children, and my husband and I grappled with what to do. It became clear to us that my daughter was being abused, but there was nothing we could prove. At the rare and precious times we saw them or we spoke, my daughter always brushed it off. I tried to untangle what was happening with a therapist, and I reached out to my son-in-law’s rabbi and spoke to friends. I spoke with organizations who were able to sympathize, validate, and advise. At least I now had a game plan for the best way to deal with this.
In 2019, my daughter finally had the courage to run away. And so began our journey to free her from her chains. We knew it would be a fight, but until you’ve dealt with a person like her husband, it’s impossible to understand it. It took over four years, with the help of ORA, four teams of lawyers, countless family members and friends, anonymous family from his side, rabbanim, gedolim, therapists, dayanim, civil judges, a GoFundMe, Mavoi Satum, a month in jail, a rally, a private investigator, and the threat of permanent jail time to make it happen. Sadly, we had to be more public as a family than we wanted to be to apply pressure, but I believe that is what finally made the difference.
My worry was all-encompassing during those years, and yet I had to keep those powerful emotions minimized, like an open computer tab, to allow me to move on with my personal life and my responsibilities at home. In order to get through each day, I could only hyperfocus on how to help in small doses. There were times that my daughter got so frustrated she said we should just move on without a get. “It was too hard, he (her husband) was too tough, he would never free her.” But I couldn’t give up. I was her mother, her children’s grandmother. This was a small way in which I could try to make it better, make up for her seven years of pain when I was frozen and helpless. For not pushing her harder to break her engagement. For not understanding how much she needed my husband and me, even when she pushed us away. Her pain was our pain, and yet it wasn’t. Being one step removed allowed me to jump in and try to help even when it felt impossible. And jump in I did.
