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>> 123 4 “A Very Delicate Problem” The Plight of the Southern Agunah One of the first interesting cases with which [I] dealt, was that of a deserted wife, an agunah. Such a matter is a very delicate problem and evokes pity for the woman. She cannot re-marry until her husband is located and gives her a “get” thereby initiating a divorce according to Jewish law. —Rabbi Tobias Geffen, “Autobiography,” 1951 The mother can so much better take care of the children and it is naturally her duty and inclination to do so, and in ninety nine out of a hundred cases wants to have her children with her if she has a means of support. —Victor Kriegshaber, president of Atlanta’s Hebrew Orphans Home, 1915 In 1914, several Jewish members of the Macon, Georgia, community appealed to the Atlanta Hebrew Orphans Home to accept custody of four children whose father had absconded to North Carolina.1 The letters they wrote to Superintendent Ralph Sonn reveal their concern that the children’s mother, Margaret Goldfarb, was ill equipped to raise her children in a manner the community considered appropriate. Following prevailing expectations for genteel understatement and discretion when it came to sensitive issues, three members of the community wrote to the home’s Board of Directors. “Frankly speaking,” wrote one, “these children are growing up wild and totally without any religious training.”2 In addition to their concern over the children’s alleged lack of guidance, members of the Macon community highlighted the mother’s 124 > 125 a regionally lopsided view of the ways in which acculturated, benevolent Jews addressed the problem of “wives without husbands.” Further, the abandoned Jewish women who published ads in the Jewish newspapers ’ “Gallery of Missing Husbands” or Yiddish personal ads pleading for their husbands’ return were predominantly from northern or mid-Atlantic cities. Thus the experiences of abandoned Jewish women in the South, and benevolent efforts to help them, are less visible in the historical record. Case files and other administrative records from southern benevolent agencies provide vital insight into the ways Jews addressed the troubling issue of desertion in spaces with comparatively small Jewish communities. These institutional records show how abandoned southern Jewish women, like Margaret Goldfarb, struggled to survive in conditions of extreme adversity, while revealing subtle change over time in the ways benevolent organizations took care of their own. While these episodes of misplaced feminine dependency and masculine recalcitrance were recurring topics of debate among Jewish social workers nationwide, the problem of wife abandonment took on special urgency in the South. Desertion signified extreme gender transgression in a region that prized strict racial segregation and white women’s protection in the private home. Moreover, benevolent agencies’ efforts to determine which deserted women were “worthy” of institutional subsidies , allowing them to keep their children at home, and which ones, like Goldfarb, were “not fit to care” for their own children, hinged on the mother’s performance of refined femininity, the location and aesthetic conditions of her home, and her willingness to follow institutional mandates regarding her children’s care. Often unsure of who was deserving of their sympathy and assistance, benevolent leaders demonstrated in their dealings with abandoned mothers their own social ambivalence and assimilationist anxieties. A “Chained Woman”: The Plight of the Agunah In observant Jewish communities, the plight of the abandoned woman, or agunah—literally “chained woman”—has challenged scholars, religious leaders, and activists for centuries. Historically, agunot have struggled to sustain their religious devotion, to navigate the challenges 126 > 127 men could be located were scarce. Having exhausted efforts to find her spouse, an agunah might have no choice but to remarry civilly, despite the stigma of mamzerut and the betrayal of her faith. Although it is impossible to provide accurate data on the number of desertions that took place in a given time and place, since shame often prevented women from reporting their husbands’ absence, scholars have shown that episodes of desertion rose substantially during times of political turmoil, economic hardship, and mass migration.10 Certainly , such was the case with the immigration of more than two million eastern European Jews to the United States from the 1880s to the 1920s.11 So significant were concerns about desertion that some European rabbis pressured couples to divorce before one member migrated ahead of the other. So went the logic: a man who left his family behind in the old country could not help but be tempted by the freedom...

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