When a husband and wife arrive at the Beth Din, they are seated in a conference room and are introduced to the officiating rabbi, the scribe, and two witnesses who will sign the Get and witness the proceedings. The parties are asked to present some form of formal identification, such as a driver’s license or passport, in order to identify themselves to the rabbis.
The officiating rabbi asks the parties some questions regarding which names they commonly use (since the Get must accurately identify the parties). After that, the husband is asked some standard questions to ascertain that he is willingly participating in the get process, and the husband then verbally authorizes the scribe to write the Get and the witnesses to sign it and witness its delivery. The husband is furnished with a prepared script in English for this purpose.
The Get is then written by the scribe using a feather quill. The Get is 12 lines long and is written in a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic in the same script that we use for the writing of Torah scrolls. Essentially, it is a letter from the husband to the wife that states that she is free to remarry anyone she wishes.
The two authorized witnesses read the Get and then sign their names to it. The wife is asked some standard questions to confirm that she is willingly accepting the get. These questions and answers are also furnished with a prepared script in English. The Get is then folded by the scribe, and the husband holds the Get over his wife’s hands, declares that he is giving it to her for the purpose of divorce, and then places the Get in his wife’s hands in the presence of the witnesses. Once the wife has received the Get, the couple is considered divorced under Jewish law.
The Get itself is cut into by the supervising rabbi and it is retained in the Beth Din files. Within a few days after the Get has been arranged, the Beth Din issues a certificate (the ptur) to each party, indicating that a Get has been given and accepted and that each party is free to remarry once their civil divorce process has been completed.
A Get can also be arranged through separate meetings with the husband and wife, such as where they are geographically distant from one another or where they are not comfortable being in the same room together. In such cases, the husband appoints an agent (shaliach) to deliver the Get on his behalf during his meeting with the rabbis. That agent (or sub-agent, in situations where the Get is sent to another rabbinical court to be delivered to a wife in a different location) then delivers the Get to the wife outside the presence of the husband.
