Lieberman clause

The Lieberman clause is a clause included in a ketubah, a Jewish wedding document, created by and named after Talmudic scholar and Jewish Theological Seminary of America professor Saul Lieberman, that stipulates that divorce will be adjudicated by a modern Bet Din (rabbinic court) in order to prevent the problem of the agunah, a woman not allowed to remarry because she had never been granted a religious divorce. It was first introduced in the 1950s by rabbis in Judaism's Conservative movement.

Background

According to Halakha (Jewish law) when a couple gets divorced it is the man who has to present the woman with a bill of divorce, called a get. Without one the couple is still viewed as married, whether a civil divorce is obtained or not. In the past, if a woman was refused a divorce because a man would not give his wife a get, the rabbis of the local Jewish community were authorized, under certain circumstances, to force the husband to do so (e.g., his refusal to be intimate with his wife as well as not giving the get, or other such serious matters). However since the Haskalah, local Jewish communities lost their autonomous status, and were subsumed into the nation in which they existed. The Jewish community lost its civil powers to enforce marriage and divorce laws. The unintended result was that rabbis lost the power to force a man to give his wife a get, and Jewish law does not allow a woman to give a get to the husband. Without a get, a Jewish woman is forbidden to remarry and is therefore called an agunah (literally "an anchored woman").