Data and Statistics

It is impossible to state a full, accurate count of the number of agunot—past or present—for several reasons:

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There is not now nor has there ever been a central authority that keeps such records.

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Rabbinic courts were and remain independent, each conducting its own affairs.

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Most significantly:

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No rabbinic court provides vetted, that is, professionally compiled statistics, based on its records.

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Nor does any rabbinic court open its records to any researcher--

allows professionals of any kind access to them-- in order to assess the number of women who are denied a get or are otherwise unable to obtain a get—

 

or to assess the behavior-- the record-- of the rabbinic court in handling divorce cases altogether, and women’s outcomes in the cases it handles, in particular.

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This is true of rabbinic courts in the Diaspora

and it is true in Israel, where the Chief Rabbinate—a state-funded body-- has refused requests even from Knesset committees for such records.

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Ask yourself:

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What kind of court practices such opacity-- the opposite of transparency-- about the record of its behavior, its actions in cases?

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Why would they do this?

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Apologists for the system then claim that there are few—or even no—agunot.

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Saying that means that agunot, their advocates, are liars. 

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This is the same as other instances of denial and cover-up of reality-- and the libeling of whistle-blowers and pursuers of justice and accountability-- as liars that Jews know from other contexts.

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Here is what we know about numbers:

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Rivka Haut and Susan Aranoff, pioneering, Orthodox agunah advocates, cite a figure of 2,000 agunot whom they alone attempted to help over the course of 30 years, beginning in 1985.

 

They report receiving an average of 60-70 calls from agunot annually, mostly from the US but also from Latin America, Israel, and Europe (Aranoff and Haut, The Wed-Locked Agunot: Orthodox Women Chained to Dead Marriages, 2015, p.15).

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The Organization for Resolution of Agunot (ORA), based in New York, reported in 2014 that it received 150 calls a year from agunot seeking assistance.

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A survey of Jewish social service organizations in the US and Canada reported that these organizations had been contacted by 462 agunot in 2011 alone.

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In 2006, the largest rabbinic association in America, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), cited a “significant agunah problem in America and throughout the Jewish world.”

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(See full citations in Shulamit S. Magnus, Jewish Marital Captivity).

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Of course--

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The number of women documented in seeking help from the above-named organizations, or from any organization, is but an unknown fraction of women in marital captivity: for any number of reasons, including intimidation, many women will not turn to organizations for help.

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ISRAEL:

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A survey conducted in Israel in 2013 cited evidence of get extortion in thousands of cases.

 

The agunah advocacy organization, Mavoy Satum, whose lawyers regularly handle divorce cases in rabbinic and state family courts, cites 1,700 women a year refused a get in Israel—reporting in 2023 that “one out of five women in Israel is unable to freely exit her marriage.

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Deliberate distortion:

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Rabbinic authorities not only withhold the raw material (their records) from which to get accurate statistics about the number of agunot-- they also deliberately manipulate and distort terminology in order to deny the problem:

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Until a case is fully adjudicated, which can take years, and perhaps not even then, rabbinic courts do not assign the term “agunah” to women who have sought and been denied a get.

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All this constitutes  collusion with get-withholding husbands  and pressure on the wife to agree to bad terms, to give up assets and rights, including in custody, child support, and visitation agreements-- in order to be free of the marriage—

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AND 

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of lengthy, often unprofessional, chaotic, and abusive court proceedings—each one of which costs money in fees to the court and to lawyers—giving the system a powerful incentive to drag out cases (about utter administrative chaos in Chief Rabbinate courts, which itself subverts the possibility of rational handling of cases, see Susan Weiss and Netty Gross-Horowitz, Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State, 2013).

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Rabbinic courts in Israel and the US alike also flip the designation “get refuser” from the get-extorting husband onto the get-seeking wife if she refuses a get-extortion deal.

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Claims then follow of supposedly equal—or even greater!--numbers of men held in marriages against their will than women held captive—iggun-denial in stage-lights, with men made the victims--

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though men of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi halakhic custom can and do get dispensation to marry a second wife without the first having received a get--

a possibility categorically denied women, who have no option but the get,

over whose granting, men have sacrosanct control in a system stacked against women.