Rabbinic Authority, Volume 3 The Vision and the Reality, Beit Din Decisions in English - Halakhic Divorce and the Agunah

In the third volume of his groundbreaking series on rabbinic authority in English, Rabbi Warburg discusses the ramifications of a Jewish divorce. In this well-composed monograph, Rabbi Warburg primarily focuses on the case of the modern day agunah, a wife who is unable to get divorced due to her husband’s recalcitrance. He addresses the various techniques, such as obligating the giving of a get (Jewish divorce document), finding relief for an agunah who signed an exploitative agreement, and listing different avenues to void a marriage (bitul kiddushin) used by the rabbinical court. This issue is of some controversy in the Jewish community, and there is heated debate about it.

Since 1999, Rabbi Dr. A. Yehuda Warburg has served as a dayan (rabbinical judge) on various battei din panels in the Hassidic, Modern Orthodox, Sephardic, and Yeshiva communities in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. He is a former research fellow at the Institute of Jewish Law at Boston University School of Law. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Tradition and served on the editorial board of The Jewish Law Annual. For over two decades, Rabbi Warburg delivered classes in Hoshen Mishpat (business law) and Even ha-Ezer (family law) to rabbinical students at Rabi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an affiliate of Yeshiva University. He is the author of dozens of articles in the areas of jurisprudence, family law, bioethics, contracts, and securities law that address the interface of Halakha and U.S. law, and he is the author of Rabbinic Authority volumes 1 and 2.