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Tshuvah Binyan Agunah

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This responsum addresses a case of *agunah* (a woman whose husband's fate is unknown) involving a radio technician who disappeared during a commercial flight from New York to Yugoslavia in October 1953. The aircraft crashed in the remote Labrador wilderness, a region characterized by impenetrable swamplands (*muskeg*) devoid of human habitation. While the wreckage was discovered eight months later with evidence that passengers survived the initial crash, no bodies were recovered despite extensive searches by Canadian authorities. The halakhic analysis draws upon Talmudic precedents regarding drowning in bounded versus unbounded waters (*mayim she-yesh lahem sof* versus *mayim she-ein lahem sof*), examining the Bach's sixteenth-century ruling that permitted remarriage when survival was impossible even in unbounded waters. The responsum applies multiple halakhic principles: comparison of the Labrador wilderness to bounded waters due to the impossibility of survival without external assistance; the doctrine of *trei rubei* (double majority) combining the statistical likelihood of death from airplane crashes with the environmental impossibility of survival; and the principle of *avad zikhro* (his memory has perished), arguing that in the modern era of communication systems, a living person would have made contact. The ruling considers the wife's seven-year search effort and the testimony of government officials as reliable evidence. Concluding that the cumulative halakhic arguments overcome the presumption of life, the responsum permits the woman to remarry, emphasizing the religious imperative to resolve cases of *agunah* when halakhically justified.

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    Published 1963

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    Yizhak Gershfeld