#freechava

Chava Herman Sharabani has been trying to obtain a get—or a divorce, according to Orthodox Jewish religious law—from her ex-husband, Naftali Sharabani, for 10 and a half years. The 30-year-old teacher lives in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn with her two children, and her marriage, as she describes it, was not a happy one. Herman Sharabani had been legally separated for a decade, but the get from the beth din, or the Jewish religious court, had been delayed.

According to tradition, it is the husband who initiates the process of issuing the get. Sharabani had left the family a decade earlier, according to Herman Sharabani and her lawyers, but she says he still refused to grant her a get. (Representatives for Naftali Sharabani did not respond to Vogue’s request for comment.) “Here I was for 10 and a half years, running after people, asking ‘Can you help me? Is there anything to do?’” says Herman Sharbani. “And they’re always like, ‘I don’t know. Call me in a week.’”

The process rendered Herman Sharabani an agunah, a woman who is trapped in a dead marriage, according to orthodox Jewish custom. (In Hebrew, the word is literally defined as “anchored” or “chained.”) Without a get, an agunah woman cannot remarry or even date. “It was just a constant banging my head on the wall,” says Herman Sharbani.

On Instagram, Herman Sharabani happened to see a DM conversation between the popular Jewish singer Dalia Oziel and a woman named Rifka Meyer, who runs a prominent sheitel (wig) salon in London. Meyer described how she had fought for a get for almost 10 years and only spoke out about her struggle recently. (Meyer received her get in September of 2020.) Seeing this conversation out in the open inspired Herman Sharabani.

Herman Sharabani reached out to Oziel and sent her a digital flyer she had created with an image of her ex-husband’s face paired with the phrase “Get Refusal Is Abuse” on it. Oziel posted the flyer to her Instagram feed.

“If I don’t use my platform for this, what good is it for?” said Oziel in an interview last month, speaking about her motivations. “I said to my followers: ‘I get it. This is uncomfortable. But we need to stand up for our fellow sister. She is chained to a dead marriage.’” Suddenly, the hashtag #FreeChava was being widely shared. Within the Orthodox community, it was impossible to miss.

The delay or denial of a get can be motivated by many different reasons. A get might be withheld to extract a favorable financial arrangement in civil divorce proceedings. Or one party may want to engineer a certain custody arrangement, even if they left the family long before. In many cases, according to Keshet Starr, a lawyer and the executive director of the nonprofit Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, those who experience get refusal are survivors of domestic abuse.

There is a growing movement to register get refusal as domestic abuse in and of itself. Amber Adler, an Orthodox Jewish mother of two who is running for city council in South Brooklyn, supports a New York State Assembly bill that would classify get refusal as coercive control and make it a felony. In some cases, the refusal perpetuates a power imbalance—get-refusing men can sometimes remarry by skewing ancient laws, leaving the woman in marital limbo. “It’s still happening, and it’s still damaging, and it’s hurting women across the board in a long-term way,” says Adler over a video call. Currently, in New York, there are two laws in place that theoretically protect against get refusal, the Domestic Relations Law 253 and Domestic Relations Law 236(b). Both are intended to prevent the get system from being misused, but both laws contain loopholes that can be exploited, says Starr. DRL 253, for instance, mandates that the person requesting the divorce must pledge that they have removed all barriers to remarriage for their spouse; but it does not work the other way around.

In addition, these laws are complicated by the division of church and state. “We have to structure any legislation carefully so that it doesn’t overreach into matters of religious law,” says Starr. “That would create constitutional problems.” Starr also notes that “on the Jewish legal side, there’s a whole body of Jewish law that is sometimes not comfortable [with civil law],” meaning that the religious figures involved in these cases may not ultimately respect civil law. While there are no concrete statistics on agunah cases, Starr is currently working with 75 women seeking a get, connecting them with local counselors and lawyers.

The intersection of religious and secular law has proved sticky terrain for women (or men) attempting to obtain a get. But the emergence of social-media-fueled activism has the potential to change the traditional power dynamics. In many ways, #FreeChava mimics other social-justice movements that have played out on social media: There is an initial post, then the repost, and sometimes a viral moment. (To date, more than 1,500 posts have used the #FreeChava hashtag.) Sometimes flyers are created depicting the get refuser in the style of a “wanted” poster. There have been color-coordinated outfit campaigns to show support: On February 25, known as PinkOutThursday, women dressed in pink to show solidarity with Herman Sharabani and recounted stories of their own attempts to obtain a get. The Instagram account @thegetbusters is a stream of supportive posts for Herman Sharabani and other agunahs. Then there is the physical mobilization: Several rallies have occurred in New York–area Jewish communities from Monsey to Lakewood to Flatbush.

The emergence of social-media-fueled activism has the potential to change the traditional power dynamics.

The pressure built by these social media-generated protests has tipped over into more traditional forms of protest within the Orthodox community. Shira Stern, who owns the blanket business Swaddle Bee in Monsey, New York worked with the Orthodox Jewish community of Lakewood, New Jersey to publicize a siruv, or a contempt-of-court order organized by rabbinical authorities to compel someone to action. “I like to shine light on positive things in the Jewish community, but once this became a campaign, I’ve been trying to advocate and get people involved,” Stern says.

The ripple effect of #FreeChava may be difficult to quantify, but its impact seems profound. Herman Sharbani “put a face to the whole movement,” says Yael Braun, who is working on her case. Braun, 33, who goes by @the_divorce_specialist on Instagram, says she is the only female toenes, an advocate in the Jewish court system, in the U.S. While Braun is not a lawyer within the United States justice system, she works within the Jewish courts and has long dealt with get-refusal cases. “I can’t tell you how many calls a day I get from people, women who’ve been suffering for years, but they didn’t even know they could say something,” says Braun. “They didn’t have a voice, and Chava really broke that. She broke the stigma of what an agunah is.”

While an agunah may have been hesitant to speak out because of shame before, the movement has encouraged other women in similar positions to come forward. Like Herman Sharabani, women have used social media and protests to help other women struggling to obtain a get. While social media has always played a part in the Orthodox Jewish community—often being deployed for charitable causes—raising awareness of get refusal is new for the community. Since Oziel’s initial post back in late February, according to Braun, 17 women have so far been freed from their agunah status by using similar tactics to the #FreeChava campaign. One of those women, says Braun, had been an agunah for 18 years.

“They didn’t have a voice, and Chava really broke that. She broke the stigma of what an agunah is.”

Part of the success of this social-media-fueled process has been the pressure it has put on authority figures within the community. Adina Miles-Sash—known as @flatbushgirl on Instagram and one of the more progressive and outspoken religious influencers—shared Herman Sharabani’s story a few weeks after the initial post. “This woman somehow became the face of this issue that has been on the back burner for far too long,” says Miles-Sash. She recalls promoting and attending a rally for another agunah: “We were going to get angry. We were going to get mad, and we were going to make it uncomfortable.”

During the rally, Miles-Sash and a group of women were approached by a prominent local rabbi who offered to broker the get. “And we were like, ‘We’re not backing down,’” says Miles-Sash. She filmed the interaction and later put it on social media. “We had 40,000 views,” says Miles-Sash. That night at 8 p.m., the woman received her get.

While Herman Sharabani herself still hasn’t received her get, she is hopeful. “My dream for other agunahs is that they’ll have protection,” she says, “that they won’t be used as leverage.” David Abramson of Abramson Law Group, who is Herman Sharabani's lawyer, and Braun, his daughter, have set up a foundation, the Agunah Foundation: Liberating Women From Chained Marriages, that will help women pay for legal fees and also set up a fund for necessities such as food, housing, and therapy.

“Everyone needs to realize that this is abuse and a human-rights issue. It isn’t just a Jewish issue—we aren’t the only religion that deals with this,” says Braun. “We can’t let our fellow human beings go through this.” Oziel, who first posted #FreeChava, is still fighting for Herman Sharabani. “Would I have ever imagined that this would’ve taken off in this way? No,” says Oziel. “But here I am, and I don’t regret any decision.”