It doesn’t happen all that often, but today I received a phone call that filled me with hope and optimism. My friend Sara, who had been an agunah for over six years, whose story is saturated with some of the most painful and trying aspects of human manipulation and abuse, called to tell me she has remarried and has a baby. I must admit, there were times when I never thought she would reach this point. “You see,” she said, “miracles do happen.” Sara was married for 12 years to a man who is publicly revered in the religious community of Jerusalem. He can be charming, charismatic and eloquent. Yet these same qualities are the very ones that turn him into a monster behind closed doors. Sara was trapped for years in his patterns of emotional abuse, and it took her that long to understand what was happening to her. The now-ex-husband would systematically put her down, insult her, and demean her. He would toss the dinner she made into the rubbish, he would tell her how terrible she looked, he would isolate her from friends and family and would make her feel like she was worthless. He was also a control freak, so that even when it seemed like he was being “nice,” he was putting her down. “Don’t you worry about the shopping, the banking, the driving,” he would say, “I’ll take care of it all.” He demonstrated distrust, controlled her money, her time and her friends, and robbed her of her sense of self-worth. “It doesn’t matter how intelligent or educated you are,” Sara says. “It happens gradually and slyly. You internalize it all and before you know it you have no self-confidence left and you self-esteem is at an all time low.” What changed the trajectory of her life, significantly, was the help of a friend. “One day, my friend said to me, ‘You know, Sara, this is abuse,’” Sara recalled. “That changed my life. That’s when I started to see, and started the process of getting out.” Sara is not alone. She is in fact just one of tens of thousands of abused women in Israel and around the world who are stuck trying to figure their way out of abusive relationships. According to Haifa University, one in seven Israeli women are abused. In the United States, it’s one in six. In Australia, studies show that one out of every four women will be in an abusive relationship at some point in her life. Abuse takes many forms – physical, emotional, verbal, sexual, financial. Sara said she “only” suffered physical attacks twice in her marriage. But the emotional and verbal abuse takes its own toll, and is in some ways harder to heal, as well as to recognize. The Crisis Center for Religious Women has a checklist of twenty-three signs of an abusive partner. Jewish Women International has a very useful chart of signs of emotional abuse. Mavoi Satum, the organization helping agunot that Sara cites...
