agunah

plural agunahs · plural agunot · plural agunoth · alternative aguna

1. A Jewish woman who is trapped in a marriage, either because her husband has disappeared or because he will not grant her a gett.

   Widows, among them agunos, chose the Holy City as a way of expressing their eternal love for God.

   1998, Dovid Rossoff, Where Heaven Touches Earth, page xii

   3 more examples

   A woman may become an agunah either through her husband's accidental disappearance or through his willful desertion, although accidental disappearance constitutes the main source of difficulty.

   1986, Menachem M. Brayer, The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature, page 187

   The problem of the agunah, the woman (or man) who is chained to a marriage and unable to free herself from this marriage, is not a new one.

   2001, Michael J. Broyde, Marriage, Divorce, and the Abandoned Wife in Jewish Law

   Our Master could see the agony of his little relative who was not yet fifteen and was already an agunah. He put aside all his civic affairs and obligations and even his regular lectures on Maimonides and Alfasi and began to look into the matter of freeing this agunah.

   2014, S. Y. Agnon, The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella, pages 10–11