How rabbis freed 9/11 widows to marry again

A new book addresses the status of wives whose husbands were killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 but whose bodies were not identified, making them agunot.

Rabbi Yona Reiss, av beit din of the Chicago Rabbinical Council, told JNS that the Beth Din of America handled 10 such cases, and four other cases were addressed by other Jewish courts.

“In many cases, their remains couldn’t be identified because they had fallen from 100 stories and they were basically pulverized or they were incinerated by the flames that broke out when the planes collided,” the rabbi said.

The book is the second volume of “Kanfei Yonah,” which RIETS Press released this week with the CRC.

Some 40% of 9/11 remains have yet to be identified scientifically, although the identities of the victims are known.

In 2001, Rabbi Reiss consulted scientists at the medical examiner’s office and rabbis “to determine the feasibility from the standpoint of halacha of relying upon DNA identification,” he said.

Rabbi Reiss said “if you have a margin of error of less than one in 1,000, then that is considered to be an ironclad proof of identification that would satisfy the halacha threshold of what’s necessary to determine that a man has been killed.”

“Halacha says that if, for example, you have a witness that sees somebody go into a fiery furnace from which they can’t escape, then even if you didn’t actually watch them die, that’s considered to be sufficient evidence,” he said.

The agunah case that took the longest to resolve — about three years — involved a woman whose husband could be placed on the 78th floor of the South Tower.

A co-worker who survived said that when she got into the elevator, before the South Tower was struck, she saw the man speaking to a Port Authority officer, who was advising him not to get into the elevator.

“Though we know this man was standing there, who knows?” Reiss said. “The plane zigzagged into the 78th floor. Maybe somehow he escaped the nose of the plane. It was very unlikely.”

“We had to rely on the passage of time in that particular case,” Reiss said. “We had to rely upon the fact that he had a good relationship with his wife and he wasn’t looking to escape her, and after three years he didn’t turn up. We also relied upon the very strong circumstantial evidence.”

“Everything comes to an end. There’s always a transition point,” he said. “The Torah provided a framework for how they should process their loss and deal with their tragedy and how they should conduct themselves in terms of transitioning from mourning to being able to move on with their lives.”

Rabbi Reiss said that the message is clear this year, the attack’s 25th anniversary.. “All the curses of the previous years should come to an end, and we’ll move on to a time of blessings,” he said.

G-d “is going to give us the opportunity to move on in a way in which we honor the memories of those who perished and never ever forget them,” he said. —JNS