halitzah

“Adolf Jellinek (1820/21 – 1893), the reform-minded rabbi from 1858 to 1893, hoped to ease some of the burdens of Jewish law for women by ignoring the laws of halitzah (the ceremony performed when a man refuses to marry his brother’s childless widow) but, like most Reform rabbis (and everyone else), he held conventional ideas about the role of women in Judaism.”

Habsburg Monarchy: Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries.