Following intense public pressure — and a little help from YouTube — an Ohio man provides a Jewish bill of divorce to the wife he abandoned in Israel
The Dayton Jewish Observer — After more than eight years of waiting, Adina Porat is finally a freed from an acrimonious marriage after a ceremony with the Israeli Rabbinate in Jerusalem on January 7.
Dayton, Ohio resident Dovid Porat, known locally by the name Eli Shur, signed the get, or Jewish bill of divorce, on December 30, two months after the New York-based Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA) launched an unprecedented social media campaign and held a rally near Shur’s home to ramp up the pressure.
According to Jewish law (halacha), the term agunah (Hebrew for “chained woman”) refers to a woman whose husband refuses to provide her with a get, thus trapping her inside the marriage. Within Orthodox halacha, a divorce isn’t final until a husband provides his wife with a get and without one, an agunah is unable to remarry.
Though ORA stages rallies and social media campaigns in cases in which behind-the-scenes negotiations don’t convince husbands to sign a get, ORA Executive Director Rabbi Jeremy Stern says this is the first time ORA has produced a video about the predicament of an agunah as part of its strategy.
“The video that we created went viral on Facebook and YouTube, followed up by the rally, and all the publicity of the rally — all of that pressure led to the issuance of the get,” Stern says.
ORA opened the website freeadina.com on October 21 to announce the rally; the site featured a video interview with Adina Porat and her children about their plight. Between then and the end of December when Shur signed the get, the video was viewed more than 68,000 times and Porat’s story was reported by international Jewish media.
More than 80 demonstrators — primarily from Orthodox communities across Ohio and Michigan — showed up for the November 8 rally near Shur’s home in Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio.
Porat’s attorney in Israel “has been involved in working out a final settlement where we took down the video, pulled the website, and we’ve promised not to rally against him,” Stern says. “And of course we put in the get (that) we dropped all claims, one against the other, and the get was issued through the Chicago Rabbinical Council.”
Stern adds that the Chicago Rabbinical Council then sent the get to the Israeli Rabbinate via UPS, which received the document in Jerusalem on January 6.
According to ORA, Shur and Porat were married in Israel in 1990. He left her and their children in 2007, and refused to provide her with a get. He departed Israel for the United States a year later.
The Israeli Rabbinate ruled in 2009 that Shur was required to give his wife a get.
In 2010, Shur arrived in Dayton to serve as ritual director of Beth Jacob Congregation. He had presented himself as a single man with no children. Nearly six months into his work at Beth Jacob, volunteers with ORA showed up at one of his evening classes at the synagogue and urged him to sign a get for his wife. He refused. In short order, he was no longer employed by the synagogue.
After Shur departed Beth Jacob, the Chicago Rabbinical Council confirmed the Israeli Rabbinate’s ruling that Shur was obligated to provide his wife with a get.
For many, one solution to the agunot dilemma that has gained traction in the Modern Orthodox world — and is now making its way into segments of the ultra-Orthodox community — is the use of halachic prenuptial agreements to provide for a get. The New York-based Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, however, also advocates for changes to rabbinic law to better protect wives.
Stern says the Porat agunah case is the 253rd ORA has resolved since its founding in 2002.
“We usually resolve about 25 cases every year, and take on about 25 new cases every year,” he says.
ORA currently has 70 active agunot cases, he adds. It has held rallies since its inception, and began leveraging social media a few years ago, which Stern says has been successful in certain cases.
Each case, he says, comes with its unique challenges. With the successful deployment of its first video, in the Porat case, he anticipates ORA will use this tactic again.
“There’s no silver bullet in any of these cases,” Stern says. “Sometimes we don’t even come to the point of a protest rally; it’s the threat of pressure which convinces the husband to give a get.”
The chances of resolving Adina Porat’s case, he says, were slim.
“We saw a miracle today. We are elated. And we are tremendously grateful to the hundreds, if not thousands of people who became active in this case — those who came to the rally and all the people who were involved in promoting this case.”
As reported by The Times of Israel