Rivka Haut, a prominent champion of Orthodox Jewish women fighting for divorce in rabbinical courts and seeking to pray together as a group, died on March 30 in the Bronx. She was 71.

The cause was cancer, her daughter Sheryl Haut said.

In 1980, when she was living in Brooklyn, Ms. Haut organized one of the first public protests in the United States concerning Orthodox divorce, outside a building owned by a man who had refused to give his wife a document known as a get, which is needed for traditional Jewish divorces. Under Orthodox law, only the husband has the power to grant a divorce.

Though Ms. Haut, a teacher and author on Jewish topics, did not question that tradition, she fought to make it easier for Orthodox women to obtain a get through rabbinical courts, where they are known as agunot (pronounced aw-goo-NOTE), Hebrew for “chained women.”

“She took a personal interest in these women and she never even considered turning anybody away,” said Blu Greenberg, the founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Ms. Haut would take calls day and night for decades, helping hundreds of women navigate the often dizzying religious procedures to receive a divorce.