agunah

English

Alternative forms

• aguna

Etymology

Borrowed from Hebrew עגונה (“chained woman”).

Noun

agunah (plural agunahs or agunot or agunoth)

1. A Jewish woman who is trapped in a marriage from which she cannot escape, either because her husband has disappeared or because he will not grant her a gett.
   • 1986, Menachem M. Brayer, The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature, page 187:

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.