Yesterday the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey announced a new series of grand jury indictments in the investigation that began in 2011 of kidnappings and assaults to force recalcitrant Orthodox Jewish husbands to give their wives a religious divorce document (get). (See prior posting.) Yesterday's indictments charged four Orthodox Jewish rabbis and one of their sons with kidnapping and conspiracy. They face maximum sentences of life in prison. According to AP, the attorney for Rabbi Jay Goldstein, one of those charged, said that the case was "overcharged" and that prosecutors failed to take into account the individual circumstances of the women who were aided in obtaining divorces. Attorneys for other defendants called the charges false.
UPDATE: Jewish Voice reports that on May 24, FBI agents made two more arrests on kidnapping charges growing out of a 2009 abduction of a man in order to force him to give his wife a get. The two were charged in a criminal complaint, taken before a magistrate and released on $500,000 bail plus home detention and electronic monitoring. The two who were charged are David Epstein (who was also name in the indictment described in the main posting) and Chaim Rubin.
