A new book, which comes 25 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City, addresses the rabbinic laws about the status of wives, whose husbands were killed in the World Trade Center.

An agunah is a woman who cannot remarry, either because her husband’s death has not been confirmed or because he won’t give her a gett, or a divorce document.

Rabbi Yona Reiss, the av beit din, or head of the Jewish court, 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.

“I wanted to find the right occasion to write about the entire episode and all of the halacha considerations that went into the resolution of the agunah cases of these women who had lost their husbands,” he told JNS.

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

The book is the second volume of “Kanfei Yonah,” which RIETS Press released this week with the CRC. The book opens with a chapter about how Reiss, who was director of the Beth Din of America in 2001, and other rabbis helped release agunot, so that they could remarry.

The rabbi told JNS that when he was asked to speak at the Dayanim Conference in Israel about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack, “it occurred to me that from an American rabbi’s perspective, this was something unique that I had to offer.”

“It was connected in a tragic way to what happened on Oct. 7, which is similar to the aftermath of the World Trade Center,” he said.

“There also needed to be many individuals identified where it wasn’t so simple to find body parts, and where they had to rely, in the same fashion we did, upon the DNA identification in many cases,” he told JNS.

Of the 2,977 victims whom al-Qaeda terrorists killed on Sept. 11, 2,753 were killed in New York City. As of last month, 1,654 victims’ remains, which are stored at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan, were identified, and the city said that it had used a new technique, which merges DNA profiling with family tree genealogical databases, to identify new remains.

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

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

Reiss told JNS that “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, assuming you found the body parts that would indicate death.”

“One of the questions was whether genetic coding could be relied upon, and the consensus was at the time that it could be relied upon, including by Rabbi Shmuel Wosner,” but the Israel-based rabbinic authority, who died in 2015, thought at the time “that it couldn’t be relied upon by itself,” Reiss said.

“It could only be relied upon together with other forms of circumstantial evidence,” he said.

In all the Sept. 11-related cases that Reiss handled, there was “very strong circumstantial evidence” that placed husbands at the World Trade Center site when the buildings were attacked.

“All of them worked above the point of impact,” he said.

“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 told JNS.

Reiss handled a case of a woman, who had previously miscarried, who was pregnant at the time that her husband was killed on Sept. 11. “There was a real concern that she might miscarry again if she was not able to go through the cathartic and therapeutic process of mourning,” he said.

“So we found an opinion of one of the great rabbis, the Chasam Sofer, who ruled that if it’s known that the beth din is dealing with a case, and everybody understands that the woman can’t be married until the beth din comes out with its official decision, then there’s no fear that her mourning process is going to lead to her getting married precipitously,” Reiss said.

The woman gave birth six months later. She was then living in the same community as Reiss and his son became good friends with her son, he told JNS.

Reiss said that there were four cases where a couple’s only child was born “either right before 9/11 or in the time period following 9/11.”

In the case where a couple had no children, and the husband left behind a brother who also didn’t have children, “the wife’s not allowed to remarry, even if you establish that the husband died, without first doing chalitza with the brother-in-law,” he said, of a ritual in which the deceased’s brother is released from his obligation to marry the widow.

“We had two such cases,” Reiss told JNS.

After a memorial program at Ground Zero, nearly a year after the terror attacks, the two families came to the Beth Din of America’s office in lower Manhattan and did the chalitza ceremonies.

One was a teenage boy, whose older brother was killed. “He was old enough, beyond bar mitzvah, to perform chalitza, but he was a very tender young child,” Reiss said. “You have to ask the fellow, ‘Are you doing it of your own free will?’”

“His initial answer was, ‘You think I want to be? I want my brother to be alive. How could this be of my own free will?’” Reiss said.

“I explained to him that, given the circumstances and the fact that his late brother’s widow needed this ceremony to be able to move on, was it something that, even though he wasn’t happy about, he was willing to do,” Reiss told JNS. “He said, ‘Yes.’ Thank God he had the fortitude of going through with it.”

Nine years later, when Reiss was serving as the dean at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, he was invited to speak at the sheva brachot, or celebratory ceremony for a newly-married couple, during which Orthodox Jews require a quorum of men.

“I knew the wife’s family. I didn’t know who the husband was,” he said. “The husband walks in the door, he looks at me, and he says, ‘I know you, Rabbi Reiss. Nine years ago I was at the Beth Din of America, and I did chalitza for my sister-in-law, and you presided over it.’”

‘Everything comes to an end’

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.”

“That was their greatest source of comfort,” he said.

The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks come on the eve of Rosh Hashanah this year, which begins at night that day.

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

God “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.

“We also honor them by continuing our lives and furthering our mission,” he told JNS.