I got a call Saturday night from an Orthodox couple on the East coast. The man had been married before. He was paying a lot of alimony to his ex-wife. She remarried in an Orthodox ceremony but they skipped the civil marriage so she’d still get alimony.
The new bride had her attorney send a letter saying she’d cancelled her wedding. She asked her ex-husband for a lump sum buyout? She was told to get lost.
She did get married again (Dec. 23, 2006). Her wedding was performed by an Orthodox rabbi (a cousin of the groom) who holds an endowed Talmud chair at Yeshiva University. The couple did not get a civil marriage license.
The rabbi admitted he married them without a marriage license. He didn’t understand why this was a problem.
He was told that $11,000 in alimony had been sucked out that very day by the new bride. The rabbi said he was appalled.
Eventually, the bride returned all alimony paid since she was Jewishly married until she got a civil marriage three weeks later (so they could avoid paying the marriage penalty in tax, which the rabbi thought was OK).
The man who runs the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), Basil Herring, was informed about the situation. He was expected to investigate the situation, give the officiating rabbi a reprimand, and tell other rabbis that this is not acceptable.
There’s a guy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who’s still paying alimony to his ex-wife after she’s gotten a religious but not civil marriage and the community has circled the wagons around her.
At least one of the Yale Five got out of the university’s requirement to live on campus by getting a civil marriage months before the religious one.
I’ve heard stories about kids at Yeshiva University and Stern College getting married young religiously but not getting civil marriage licenses so they can stay on their parents health insurance.
I’ve heard stories about kollel students who are married with kids but they’re not married civilly so their wives can collect welfare as single parents with kids.
Rabbi Herring reported back to the complaining couple that he spoke to the officiating rabbi and the rabbi only had good intentions and that was the end of it.
The correspondence with Rabbi Herring was shown to a leader at JTS who responded that Rabbi Herring had to be crazy to sweep this under the rug. It would’ve been easy to give the officiating rabbi a reprimand and to make a policy statement about abiding by the law of the land.
Rabbi Herring won’t make any such policy statement and when pushed about it he got really nasty.
I bet that when Rabbi Steven Weil takes over the RCA, he will handle such matters differently.
"It’s a terrible thing for the Jews to manipulate the system this way," says a source.
"The [officiating] rabbi is the gatekeeper for the state," says another source. "He committed a crime by doing this.
"It’s like telling the policeman when you get stopped, ‘I’m going to take the driving test next week.’ The rabbi committed a crime. It’s not a victimless crime. It cost me money in legal fees and a private investigator. I wouldn’t have had to get a private investigator if I could’ve gotten a copy of a marriage license."
"I sent the same 24-page letter I sent to Basil Herring to Yeshiva University. This is a guy who teaches people to be rabbis. They blew me off also. They said it’s not academic. It’s not plagiarism or forgery. We’ll let the RCA deal with it."
"If Rabbi Herring had told me that ‘We discussed it, we put a letter in his folder and we put an item in the newsletter,’ he could’ve shut me up in two seconds. Instead he told me, in effect, to go jump in the lake."