When Rabbi Moshe Morgenstern came to London from New York last week, the leader of Orthodox Jews in Britain, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and his senior Orthodox colleagues denounced him. His activities were "creating confusion and false hopes. . . the effect of his actions will be to create untold human misery for years to come", Prof Sacks said.
Rabbi Morgenstern had come to Britain to "tackle an issue that goes back to the Bible times", according to the director of the Jewish Marriage Council, Mr Jeffery Blumenfeld.
The rabbi's visit - during which he officiated at a marriage ceremony for a 32-year-old Jewish woman who had not secured a religious divorce from her first husband - was brief. Yet in that short time he managed to stir up the hornet's nest that is Jewish divorce with all its inherent inequalities, so that once more Orthodox law was portrayed to a secular society as bizarre and anomalous.
To be fair, little more could have been expected of Prof Sacks than that he denounce Rabbi Morgenstern in the face of what he believed was a clear breach of halachah - the religious law. He has agonised over the fate of agunot - the "women in chains" whose husbands have refused to grant them a religious divorce, but practical solutions have been thin on the ground.
For Orthodox Jews marriage is a consensual union between two people, not in terms of "till death us do part" but only until the couple are no longer able to support the marriage. But divorce is not so simple when one side does not accept, for whatever reason, that the marriage is over.
Jewish religious law is heavily weighted in favour of men. It is the husband who gives his wife a get - a religious divorce. The wife cannot give it, but she can refuse to accept it, just as the husband can refuse to give it if he is unwilling to end the marriage.
For women the problem is compounded by the fact that although the marriage can be ended in the civil court if she does not have the get and decides to re-marry (she can only do this in a civil ceremony if she does not have the get) any children of the new marriage live with the stigma of being known as mamzerim, or the result of a "forbidden union".
To address the problems faced by agunot, Rabbi Morgenstern claims to have found a chink in halachah and is proposing to retrospectfully annul marriages. This, he argues, would release women from the chains of Orthodoxy and allow them to remarry.
The Jewish Marriage Council has roundly rejected this proposal. And Mr Blumenfeld can only see more heartache in the future: "If the first marriages are annulled it would mean the children of those marriages would become mamzerim, creating a whole new group of people whose hopes are dashed."
"Of 800 Jewish marriages a year in the UK, there are about 235 gittin [religious divorces], but increasingly a lot of people don't bother about it. They get divorced in the civil courts and the get is not considered," says Mr Blumenfeld. Most problems occur when a husband or wife uses the get as a weapon, either to extract financial concessions or because they are unhappy with the terms of their divorce.
Much better, he says, for couples to adopt the Harvard Business School approach to solving problems and "negotiate, mediate and work out their differences", applying along the way a little moral pressure so that if the marriage is over, the get is given and accepted.
Many lay Jewish activists are particularly unhappy with Prof Sacks's response to Rabbi Morgenstern's visit. Among the activists is Rosalind Preston, who chaired the Chief Rabbi's 1994 report on Jewish Women in the Community: "Nothing is happening on this issue. We understand that Jewish law appears to make it impossible to reinterpret the laws on divorce. But his response was lacking and we haven't been given the reasons why it is not acceptable.
"It is not a fringe problem any more. There is a high divorce rate in the Jewish community, nearly the same as in the rest of the UK. Women are initiating divorce and are not prepared to stay in this never-never land. And particularly now, with the concentration on human rights and equality, women are becoming scholastically informed and are able to argue and discuss this problem."
The appointment of a new judge to the Jewish religious court, the beth din, to look exclusively at the issue of religious divorce is, says Preston, "just a dot in the ocean". What is needed is a world conference of Jewish religious leaders to examine religious law so that Jewish women and men would see that the issue was being tackled head on.
Preston insists Orthodox Jews in Britain are not about to split on this issue, but it is a problem that needs an urgent solution: "It will not cause a schism. But even if it was only one person it would be important. This is not something that is going to go away."