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60 t w o The Scarlet Agunah At some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Jonathan Cowan met Allison Coopersmith while scuba diving in Eilat. Jonathan , a modern Orthodox British Jew, came to Israel in the 1980s while still a student. Allison Coopersmith, also British, was in Israel on holiday. Both are children of Holocaust survivors. Jonathan, who comes from a long line of illustrious Torah scholars and rabbis, is a taciturn man with muted emotional responses. He grew up in Golder’s Green, the heavily Jewish suburb of London , and spent years studying Talmud at the illustrious yeshiva of Gateshead in northern England. Allison is a redhead with a then-nascent sense of humor that blossomed with age and tribulation. She grew up in Hendon, another Jewish London suburb, where she attended a government school in the mornings and a private, liberal Jewish seminary in the afternoons. Only in her early twenties when they first met, Allison was totally mesmerized by Jonathan, who seemed to be just the opposite of her beloved but ordinary father. Her father had only two interests in life — making money and watching the evening news from his adored lounge chair. Jonathan was a renaissance man who could talk about anything and had an opinion about everything, from British politics to jazz, the latest technology, Muslim fundamentalism, and so on. For Allison, one sticky point with Jonathan, who was at the time a physics student at the Technion in Haifa, was his desire to live permanently in Israel, T h e S c a r l e t A g u n a h 61 or make aliyah (Hebrew for “ascent”). She admired his romantic determination to live in the Holy Land and his individualistic spirit, but she wasn’t sure at all about making the move herself. She preferred English manners and tea and crumpets to Israeli brashness and falafel. Moreover, she was not sure if she could live a religious lifestyle, Jonathan’s condition for marriage. Shabbat was nice, in her mind, but strict kashrut and mikveh were questionable. Still, Allison overcame her reservations and the wedding was held, at Jonathan ’s request, in an Orthodox synagogue in London. Days before the ceremony they went to a county clerk who, after verifying that neither was married , issued a state marriage license. The officiating rabbi mailed the endorsed license back to the clerk after the ceremony, and Jonathan and Allison received their British marriage certificate in the post, pronouncing them man and wife in the eyes of the state. The couple enjoyed all the trappings of a British wedding . Allison wore a streamlined Edwardian-style gown with covered buttons up the back. Jonathan sported tails. A chauffeured Rolls-Royce ferried them from synagogue to dinner hall, where a costumed master of ceremonies toasted the couple. But despite all the festivities, Allison’s spirits fell irredeemably after Jonathan, saying he was too shy, refused to sit beside her on a bench fashioned as a sort of throne for the two of them. The throne incident foreshadowed what was to come. Jonathan was rarely, if ever, by her side, preferring the company of his books or of mysterious business partners whom Allison never met. Allison’s parents had been anxious about the union from the start, mostly because of Jonathan’s nationalistic political and religious views. Their daughter, they fretted, had been raised in a Reform home where Zionism was hardly emphasized. A divorced older cousin who had resisted pressure from her former spouse to move to Israel mentioned that she had avoided it, among other reasons, because “men have the upper hand in Israeli divorces.” Allison did not realize that it was a veiled warning. Like many Reform Jewish brides she had never heard of a get and had no idea what it was, or of its ramifications, let alone that in Israel there was no civil divorce. The Israeli aliyah emissary in London said nothing about it. Allison ignored her father’s warning that her fiancé’s family was “very weird,” and she attributed his dislike of the family and disapproval of Jonathan to parental skittishness. Shortly after the wedding, Allison’s parents were alarmed when they learned Jonathan had insisted that Allison sign over...

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