Relatives of man in divorce scandal resign from Artscroll

NEW YORK — Two relatives of the man who has refused to give his wife a religious divorce temporarily resigned their positions with the religious publisher Artscroll.

Rabbis Yosaif Asher Weiss, author of Artscroll’s “Daily Dose of Torah,” and Yisroel Weiss will temporarily resign, according to a blog post on the publisher’s website.

Artscroll had come under fire for continuing to employ the two because Yosaif Asher Weiss’s son, Avrohom Weiss, has declined to grant a religious divorce to his wife, Gital Dodelson. Yisroel Weiss is Avrohom Weiss’s uncle.

The pressure resulted from a long article Dodelson published November 4 in the New York Post describing the situation.

Artscroll published a letter from the two men in which they assert that accusations against their family amount to a “campaign of slander” and accuse the Dodelson family of perpetrating a “heinous desecration of G-d’s name.”

Nevertheless, they wrote, the controversy has the potential to “distract Artscroll from its holy work” and, as a result, they resigned “until the situation is resolved.”