'Betrayed' Jewish women sue rabbis | World news

'Betrayed' Jewish women sue rabbis

Helen Chayie Sieger practised the faith of the community in which she lived in Brooklyn: that of Bobovar Hassidic Jewry. Now she has been branded by its elders as a sinner, 'totally unfit for sexual intercourse'.

Chani Lightman, on the Modern Orthodox wing of the Jewish faith, did likewise, in Cedarhurst, Long Island. Now, the secrets she confided in her spiritual guide stand to cost her the custody of her children, as they were spread about the community to denounce her.

Both women are, and have always been, deeply religious, loyal to their beliefs and their people. Sieger, 45, is a nursing home administrator. Lightman, 38, a mother of four children, is a nurse.

Battle lines have been drawn around them. To some they are heretics and outcasts, to others beacons of bravery, dignity and reform.

During the coming weeks, in parallel legal actions, Sieger and Lightman will walk a tightrope between Jewish and secular law.

Lightman is suing a rabbi whom she accuses of betraying confidences to her husband. She had gone to Rabbi David Weinberger for marriage counselling and had told him intimate details about sex and even violence behind closed doors in the marriage with her estranged husband, Dr Hylton Lightman.

Then she began to hear whispers in the tightly knit community - that she was failing to live by religious law - even, according to the court papers, that she was 'seeing a man in a social situation'.

And when it came to a legal tangle over the custody of the couple's four children, Lightman was appalled to find that details of her confidences with the rabbi were contained in the papers.

She took her case to court, winning a summary judgment from Justice David Goldstein, who called the rabbi's action 'not only improper, it was outrageous and offensive'.

Now Lightman is seeking damages said to run 'into millions'. 'I am religious and feel very strongly about Judaism,' said Lightman, 'but I don't feel this is a representation of what Judaism or religion is. It is simply an abuse of power by some men.'

Sieger's case is more complex, more squalid and cuts far deeper. She is suing for $13 million an assembly of 100 rabbis across the United States and Canada, claiming that some of the rabbis were paid in cash by her estranged husband of 26 years to grant a special 'polygamous' divorce. Orthodox Jews who seek a divorce in the civil courts are subject, of course, to the same law as any American. But in order to remarry they must also secure or be granted a get , a religious divorce.

Sieger left her husband Chaim, whom she married in 1972, in 1995. The following year she was advised by the chief rabbi of the Bobov community to see one of the men she is suing - a Rabbi Herbst - to talk about her marital difficulties. She decided not to do so. But two years later Herbst 'falsely' wrote to tell her she was obliged under Jewish law to consult him. She did so on condition of confidentiality. She told him 'many intimate details' of the 'long and troubled marriage'.

She initiated divorce proceedings and appeared three times before a rabbinical court to secure the get. Out of the blue a letter arrived from her husband's attorney to say that 'as you are aware, a rabbinical divorce has already been granted'. Indeed it had - a rare heter meah rabonim , reserved for either sinners against Jewish law or else the mad and comatose.

A heter is not a divorce, but an endorsed polygamy, enabling a man to take another wife in extreme circumstances, where the bonds of the existing marriage defied all hope of happiness.

The heter included intimate details, which Sieger says could have come only from Rabbi Herbst, to show that she was 'not fit to live with and have sexual relations with'. Sieger's case has caused consternation in Brooklyn, home to the world's biggest communities of Hassidic Jews. Meetings have heard impassioned speeches for and against her. And behind it all is a woman 'strangled', she says, 'by stigma'.

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