The Chicago Rabbinical Council, a nonprofit that has a kosher certification arm, has developed what it says is an innovative model for Jewish divorce, which combines mediation and binding arbitration to address legal, religious and communal dimensions of divorce.

The CRC program allows divorcing couples to begin in mediation, turn to the beit din, or religious court, for arbitration on disputes that they cannot resolve and then return to mediation. If mediation breaks down fully, the case can proceed to arbitration.

Rabbi Levi Mostofsky, executive director of the CRC, told JNS that the program offers a healthier approach to the trauma of divorce, including its spiritual and communal aspects.

Couples entering the program sign a legally binding mediation-arbitration agreement that gives halachic, or Jewish legal, jurisdiction to the CRC's beit din as an arbitrating body and legal authority over the case under contract and arbitration law.

“If there’s just certain issues that we really cannot resolve, or it cannot resolve in mediation, we can send the parties to the beit din for arbitration just on that one issue, and then they can come back to mediation,” Elana Lipman, CRC director of divorce mediation services and an Illinois-licensed attorney, told JNS.

Separate teams handle the mediation and arbitration functions, and the process can address financial matters and parenting and custody disputes. When couples reach an agreement via mediation, the CRC prepares a memorandum of understanding that their attorneys can use to draft the legal agreement filed in civil court.

The CRC encourages each party to have independent legal representation.

Orthodox Jews understand religious requirements of divorce to begin with the husband, who must initiate the proceedings voluntarily. Some men refuse to grant divorces to their wives, whose status then becomes "chained,"agunah in rabbinic terminology. Such husbands have been targeted by protests and in some communities, by degrees of excommunication. Some Orthodox communities have encouraged what they call rabbinic prenups.

The CRC hybrid structure can also make it easier for the Jewish religious divorce—or get—to be given before disputes over finances and children are resolved, the nonprofit says. Once the jurisdiction of the beit din is secured, neither spouse needs to preserve the get as leverage or worry about measures the other side might take, according to Mostofsky.

“That’s what we always push—is for the get to be given, then to go through mediation,” he told JNS.

The CRC’s formal program grew out of professional mediation work that it had previously conducted without a dedicated framework and was established after Lipman joined the nonprofit. The CRC thinks that other rabbinic courts could replicate that model and says it is committed to helping them do so.

The program is supported in large part by a grant from the Walder Foundation, enabling the CRC to charge low fees and avoid turning away clients who cannot afford its services, it said.