to facilitate grassroots awareness of Jewish marital captivity—iggun—and promote actions to end it.

 

This site provides information about

​

• the origin, the cause of iggun; 

• the long history of this abuse and how it has functioned in the past and functions now;

• how iggun is perpetuated; 

• and how to end it.

 

Because iggun can be ended

 

through informed, grassroots action, based on full, accurate, honest information and alternatives. 

​

Project Miriam is wholly independent, with no denominational or institutional affiliation.

​

It is directed to Jewish women of any and all religious affiliation and none

in Diaspora communities and Israel.

 

Because iggun is a Jewish problem. 

 

Not an Orthodox problem.

 

Or an Israeli problem.

 

It crosses all religious and geographic lines.

 

 

Many are unaware of how it can engulf them or loved ones. 

 

They think themselves immune to it—

that they or loved ones cannot become agunot—women kept—“chained”-- in marriages against their will (sing., agunah)—

​

• because they are “not Orthodox” 

• or don’t live in Israel

• or because they had this or that marriage ceremony, which they think, mistakenly, protects them

• or because they signed a halakhic pre-nuptial agreement, which pioneering, Orthodox, agunah-advocates, Rivka Haut and Susan Aranoff long ago, rightly termed, “the dangerous illusion.”

 

Project Miriam is about full, accurate, honest, truth telling whose goal is ending Jewish women’s marital captivity and promoting good Jewish alternatives in marriage and divorce (see Conscious Jewish Marriage).

 

Project Miriam provides information to enable Jewish women to take the steps needed to protect themselves and their loved ones from falling victim to iggun—PREVENTION -- 

 

and so that we cease participating, however unknowingly, in the perpetuation of iggun for others — through continued use of kinyan and kiddushin to enact Jewish marriage (see FAQs on the Source of Iggun-Jewish Women’s Marital Captivity).

 

HISTORY

 

Iggun has been a feature of Jewish societies from earliest recorded times throughout Jewish history, in every era and community, across the Jewish world:

 

in the Middle East and North Africa; 

 

in medieval Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewries;

 

in early modern Mediterranean and Italian Jewries; 

 

in the Ottoman Empire, including the pre-State yishuv;

 

in Australia; 

 

the UK; 

 

France; 

 

Germany; 

 

Eastern Europe; 

 

the United States; 

 

and the State of Israel.

 

There is no aspect of it — including husbands extorting wives to receive a rabbinic divorce, a get — that does not have a very long history, documented again and again, over centuries, in rabbinic, communal, and family records across the Jewish world.

 

This is one piece of Jewish history we must bring to an end.

 

 

Project Miriam respects the beliefs of all Jewish women, religious and secular.

 

It rejects the enjoinder to agunot who follow rabbinic law (halakha)--- “why don’t they just leave?”—as another form of telling women to pay a price to be free of an unwanted marriage.

 

Project Miriam supports Jewish women’s freedom of religious conscience and practice as fundamental and unalienable, never to be treated as a price to pay-- among others routinely justified by many rabbinic authorities—for freedom to exit a marriage.

 

Project Miriam seeks to support women who wish to remain Jewishly observant 

however they define this while being free to end their marriages. 

 

It rejects any assertion that Jewish religious practice and remaining tied in iggun are an inextricable package of religious compliance or piety (the “domino” or “house of cards” argument; see in FAQs).

 

On the contrary. 

 

Project Miriam asserts that marital abuse embedded in religious practice sullies Jewish life and alienates Jews from Jewish life while ending Jewish women’s marital captivity and establishing good, Jewish alternatives in marriage and divorce fosters vibrant Jewish connection.

​

• Project Miriam seeks to support women who are “tradition friendly”: 

 

who are not consistently observant of halakha but who consider traditional rabbinic marriage and divorce rites “authentic” or just a given and not worth fighting over and who do not understand the legal meanings of those rites in the moment of marriage or their legal consequences down the road.

 

• Project Miriam seeks to support secular, Israeli women, who have no alternative under Israeli law to divorce in rabbinic courts 

 

and who become agunot 

 

because they were not aware of the legalities of traditional rabbinic marriage

 

or how something as seemingly neutral and purely functional as registering as “married” with Israel’s Ministry of Interior

 

will land them in ultra-Orthodox rabbinic courts for divorce.

 

 

As long as individual Jewish women, in all our diversity, see marriage as an individual, a denominational, or a geographic issue (Israel)

 

rather than a Jewish issue 

 

beyond all religious and geographic lines-- 

 

marital captivity will continue and women will become agunot.

 

 

• The end to this abuse comes from understanding that its source is the manner in which rabbinic marriage is enacted

 

in kinyan and kiddushin-- the groom’s unilateral acquisition and sanctification of exclusive access to his wife’s body—an act of sexual objectification and commodification in the act of marriage--

 

and in their replacement with good Jewish alternatives (See: Better Jewish Ways to Enter Committed Relationships in Marriage)

 

• The end to iggun will come from awareness of its long history and how and why iggun functioned in Jewish communities throughout Jewish history, and continues to function today

​

• and from understanding that iggun is a systemic problem, not the individual misfortune of this or that woman, however much individual women are victimized;

 

• it will come from awareness of how pre-modern, pious Jewish women in traditional communities— there was nothing else—

 

resisted it assertively, aggressively, and transgressively, forcing change within those communities and some real protection for women--

 

and from claiming this precedent as part of a policy for today--

 

the necessary rest of that policy being conscious, organized support by families and communities to agunot so that agunot are freed of coerced continuation in marriage, without payoffs, and have viable exit options.​

 

Continuing to treat iggun as if it were the individual misfortune of this or that woman, rather than a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions, perpetuates the abuse for others to fall victim to it. 

 

Such an approach is a part of the problem, no solution to it.

 

 

• The end to iggun will come when its underpinnings in uninformed or uninterrogated, received, practice 

 

are replaced by honest, full information 

 

and by good alternatives that become the Jewish norm 

 

through grassroots, Jewish actions

 

and through organized, communal efforts, across denominational and geographic/ political lines, specifically geared to that goal. 

 

​​​