Relatives of man in divorce scandal resign from Artscroll

Father and uncle of Avrohom Weiss take parting shots at Dodelson family in resignation letter

By JTA and ToI Staff 13 November 2013, 9:53 am

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A photo of five volume The Sapirstein Edition Rashi Artscroll Chumash. (photo credit: public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

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.”