“I don’t understand how a rabbi can issue a ruling on a matter of life and death without even talking to the parties. We’re not talking about koshering a knife here.”
Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv
Writing in the Forward, Elana Maryles Sztokman lists a partial litany of the rotten things the late Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyahiv – the supreme haredi ‘gadol,’ a dour, cold, heartless man – did to women.
For example, Rabbi Elyashiv adopted a 16th century opinion by the Maharshdam, Rabbi Shmuel di Medina of Saloniki, who ruled that a man may never be pressured in any way to give his wife a get (Jewish divorce).
According to Elyashiv, if any pressure is exerted by the woman or the beit din, then the get is invalid.
Further, any children conceived with another man and born to the woman thereafter would therefore be mamzerim, halakhic bastards, and forbidden to ever marry a “pure” Jew.
Rabbi Elyashiv ruled this way even though there are many much more lenient opinions from important rabbis both before and after di Medina that were the basis for the normative (and much more lenient) halakha before Elyashiv's rulings (and even though halakha commands rabbis to find ways to be lenient in these matters).
(That official state Orthodox rabbis associated with the chief rabbinate were lenient is probably the political reason behind Elyashiv’s bizarre strictness.)
Sztokman notes:
One agunah named “Orit” whose story was reported in Maariv several years ago, suffered personally from Elyashiv’s refusal to allow the rabbinical court to help her. She described a marriage full of physical, emotional, and financial abuse, from which she had to escape in fear of her life. The rabbinical judges actually issued a “hiyuv get,” an order to give a get, but she never knew about it because the husband turned to Elyashiv for support, who ruled that the parties should come to an “understanding” rather than pressure the man.
“I don’t understand how a rabbi can issue a ruling on a matter of life and death without even talking to the parties,” Orit’s advocate told Maariv at the time. “We’re not talking about koshering a knife here.”
The problem is, for Rabbi Elyashiv, there was no real difference between ruling on an inanimate object's status and ruling about the life of a human being.
He lacked human emotion, and he failed to follow the long-set rabbinic precedent to rule leniently whenever possible rather than inflict pain and suffering on Jews.
And that will be Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv's ultimate legacy.