  The focus of this paper is the phenomenon of rigidity for measure-preserving
actions of countable discrete abelian groups and its interactions with weak
mixing and recurrence. We prove that results about $\mathbb{Z}$-actions extend
to this setting:
  1. If $(a_n)$ is a rigidity sequence for an ergodic measure-preserving
system, then it is a rigidity sequence for some weakly mixing system.
  2. There exists a sequence $(r_n)$ such that every translate is both a
rigidity sequence and a set of recurrence.
  The first of these results was shown for $\mathbb{Z}$-actions by Adams, Fayad
and Thouvenot, and Badea and Grivaux. The latter was established in
$\mathbb{Z}$ by Griesmer. While techniques for handling $\mathbb{Z}$-actions
play a key role in our proofs, additional ideas must be introduced for dealing
with groups with multiple generators.
  As an application of our results, we give several new constructions of
rigidity sequences in torsion groups. Some of these are parallel to examples of
rigidity sequences in $\mathbb{Z}$, while others exhibit new phenomena.
