Religious Gets Still in the News After All These Years.

Religious Gets Still in the News After All These Years.

Arizona courts had to deal with the issue of a religious get in 1993 in Victor v. Victor. The Arizona Court of Appeals found, not surprisingly, that the dissolution court did not have authority to order a husband to grant a “get” to Wife as part of their divorce decree.

The issue apparently still exists. The New York Times updated the get issues in an article on March 16, and described how the Orthodox Jewish community is handling things by recommending a Jewish prenuptial agreement of sorts. It sounds like a reasonable solution to an unfair situation that included some spouses holding hostage the religious “get” (divorce) in return for huge sums of money.

But, in light of the Victor court’s discussion of whether a ketubah is a valid prenuptial agreement (see the last section of the Victor decision), I have to wonder if the halakhic prenuptial agreement that’s suggested in the article needs to fulfill all the requirements of a valid prenuptial agreement, under Arizona’s version of  the Uniform Act, in order to be enforceable in Arizona.

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