Abstract
In his novel The Agunah, The Yiddish author Chaim Grade portrays the course of a bitter controversy in Vilna, Lithuania, during the late 1920s and early 1930s between an impoverished younger Rabbi and the city’s authoritative Rabbinic Council. The immediate cause of the controversy is a young widow whose husband has disappeared in combat (along with his entire regiment) during the opening days of the First World War. Because no one had actually seen the husband fall in battle or found his body, the woman remained an agunah, abandoned wife, who, according to standard Jewish legal thinking, was forbidden to remarry. Consequently, when the woman sought permission for remarriage after fifteen years of waiting, she was coldly rebuffed by the Council’s expert on such matters.
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Green, R.M. (1985). Contemporary Jewish Boethics: A Critical Assessment. In: Shelp, E.E. (eds) Theology and Bioethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7723-6_15
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