A new legal ruling clarifies the tactics that agunos, women who are “chained” in marriages, can deploy in seeking a Jewish divorce.

For nearly twenty years, Lonna Ralbag has been unable to remarry in the Jewish community, despite receiving a civil divorce in 2008. Her ex-husband, Israel Mayer Kin, never gave her a Jewish divorce, known as a get, rendering her an agunah, a “chained woman” who is prohibited to remarry according to most interpretations of Orthodox Jewish law.

Ralbag, supported by many Orthodox rabbis and activists, has engaged in efforts to shame, exclude, and otherwise pressure Kin into providing her a get. They successfully convinced the Rabbinical Council of California to forbid any of Kin’s relatives a Jewish burial in the state of California. During Kin’s controversial remarriage in 2014, protestors allied with Ralbag shouted “bigamist” and “shame on you,” at the couple. In many congregations, Kin is not counted as part of a minyan, the quorum required for communal prayer, and is not allowed to lead services or be called up to the Torah.

Kin’s family fought back with a lawsuit against Ralbag, saying she’d engaged in defamation. They alleged that they suffered “defamation and negligent infliction of emotional distress” from her and her supporters. On Tuesday, Rockland County Judge Thomas P. Zugibe dismissed the defamation suit. 

The court win cuts off a tactic for recalcitrant husbands to use in agunah cases, Ralbag’ lawyer Akiva Shapiro said in an email to Shtetl: “While we cannot rest until Ms. Ralbag receives an unconditional get, she and other agunahs will at least be protected going forward from these kinds of intimidation tactics in the form of baseless defamation suits.”

Among the Kins’ complaints was the highly publicized decision by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate to preemptively deny Kin’s father the future opportunity to be buried in Israel, whenever he might pass away. That decision followed an attempt at a deal surrounding the death of Kin’s mother in 2019. The Rabbinate initially barred Kin’s mother from interment in Israel, but a deal was reached where she would be buried in exchange for Kin delivering Ralbag a get. When Kin reneged on the deal and did not give Ralbag a get after his mother was buried in Israel, the rabbinate made its preemptive decision about Kin’s father.

But the judge said that none of the actions the Kins were complaining about are speech at all. What Ralbag did added up to, “non-speech ‘actions’ taken by defendant that do not constitute defamation as a matter of law,” he ruled.

In order to meet the legal standard for defamation, the defendant must have made specific defamatory statements against the plaintiff, the judge said. Much of what the Kins were complaining about were actions or speech made by others in response to Ralbag’s situation, not her actual speech.

“In fact, the complaint does not allege a single statement made by defendant concerning the named plaintiffs,” the judge wrote.