The Tripartite Agreement Kit

“The Tripartite Agreement” is a halakhic prenuptial agreement which aims to prevent the classic agunah problem from arising within an Orthodox Jewish marriage and unlike many other agreements, it works without any intervention from the secular court.

The classic agunah is a woman whose husband is not present (physically or mentally); who has disappeared without our knowledge of his death; who cannot express his will if he is living; or the like.

This agreement is call “The Tripartite Agreement” because it combines three different halakhic mechanism to give a Jewish divorce together into one agreement in order to free a woman who is an agunah. In the case of an agunah, God forbid, the woman must petition an Orthodox Rabbinical Court to implement the agreement which supervises this process.

We post it here for its distribution, although both of us think that the conventional agreements widely used (the Binding Arbitration Agreement of the Beth Din of America or the Agreement for Mutual Respect – Heskem l’Kavod Hadadi are indispensable and should be signed in all marriages along with the “Tripartite Agreement”

 

 Rabbi Prof. Michael Broyde                               Dr. Rachel Levmore, To’enet Rabbanit