Eshel Online » Eshel in the Media

Eshel in L.A.

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 01:17:01 +0000

Jewish Community Foundation Awards Cutting Edge Grant to a JQInternational and Eshel partnership in Los Angeles

Funding Will Make Possible Initiatives Supporting Jewish Civic Life,

Arts & Culture, Human Services, and Continuity

September 9, 2015

The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (The Foundation) announced that it has given a total of $1.5 million in Cutting Edge Grants to seven local nonprofit organizations for highly innovative programs that are intended to engage diverse segments of the Jewish community ranging from college students and senior adults to the LGBTQ population and interfaith families.

In a historic partnership with JQInternational and The Institute for Judaism, Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), Eshel has been awarded funding to do outreach to Orthodox institutions, families and individuals in the Los Angeles Area. This new partnership is designed so that all three partners can work together to conduct outreach to a typically difficult to reach population. Eshel is one of the leading Jewish organizations working on behalf of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in the Orthodox world.

Says Eshel’s Executive Directors, Miryam Kabakov, “this is a tremendous opportunity to reach out to the Orthodox population of the greater Los Angeles area and we are grateful to The Foundation. We have received calls and emails from parents of LGBT children and individuals looking for community. There are individuals in difficult to reach enclaves of the Haredi community that find us by word of mouth and the internet. We hope to spread the word so they can.”

Eshel has a robust parent network of over 100 Orthodox parents across the nation who connect, share resources and mentor each other in navigating the often bumpy ride of having an LBTQ child in Orthodox community. Thus, the partnership will focus on community programming for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families, and educational programs, including trainings at local day schools and providing a speakers’ bureau of Orthodox and formerly-Orthodox LGBTQ people.

Rabbi Steve Greenberg, also an Executive Director of Eshel, who has taught in the LA community says that we are likely to work with more Persian and Sephardic Jews in the LA area. The name Eshel refers to “Eshel Avraham,” the tamarisk tree under which the biblical Sarah and Abraham would welcome visitors. We hope to be that place where we can welcome Orthodox and traditional LGBT Jews and their families who have their own set of specific challenges when a child comes out.”

There will be two introductory events coming up in the LA area during October.

The first will be a meeting of the Eshel LA parent group on Oct. 20th 7 – 9 pm

Address: Home of Yisraela Hayman

1133 S La Peer Dr Los Angeles CA 90035 (corner Pico Blvd)

Meet Eshel Executive Director Rabbi Steve Greenberg as we kick off the first meeting for Orthodox and traditional parents and relatives of LGBTQ children. This will be a confidential gathering for family members to discuss the challenges and joys of having an LGBTQ child in Orthodox circles.

Then on Oct. 21st from 7-9 pm there will be a gathering of the Eshel LGBTQ group

Address: Home of Ben Goodman and Xavier Velazco

1632 N. Sierra Bonita Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90046

Join Eshel for refreshments and a text study with Rabbi Greenberg entitled:

Six Heros and Scoundrels:

Portraits of LGBT Jews in Traditional Jewish Texts

Same-sex love, while surely hidden and formally decried, finds surprising expression in Jewish poetry, prose and case law. The material is full of pathos, gender bending, humor and intrigue and reveals a sliver of life, despite the well known prohibition, that has been all but erased from historical memory. We will meet six queer characters of Jewish history, some famous, others infamous whose stories will help us to make sense of the issue for today.

Please RSVP and send questions to info@eshelonline.org

- See more at: http://www.eshelonline.org/eshel-in-los-angeles/#sthash.Udvmamg3.dpuf

Moment Magazine

Miryam Kabakov — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 01:15:23 +0000

Steve Greenberg: How Orthodox Jews Changed Their Minds On Gay Rights

Same-sex rights proponents suffered an unusual loss this week when a federal judge in Louisiana upheld the state’s ban on gay marriage, bucking a domino-like chain of favorable rulings on the issue. Overall, 21 states have toppled bans since the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013–a trend that reflects a remarkable shift in pubic opinion. In general, Jews have been at the forefront of this shift: More than 80 percent of Jewish Americans now support gay marriage, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.

But while Jewish Reform circles have long supported gay rights, the same is far from true in the Orthodox world. In the past three decades, the dominant Orthodox understanding of homosexuality has undergone a dramatic shift of its own: from rebellion against God, to mental illness, to at least one Orthodox rabbi calling homosexuality merely “a feature of the human condition.” Steve Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, co-founder of Eshel and author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, explains the shift and its relation to changing American attitudes to Moment. –Rachel E. Gross.

Did you expect the dramatic attitude shift in America toward gay rights?

It’s a remarkable cultural transformation. I would not have imagined that attitudes would have changed this quickly. It’s true that the Orthodox world is still lagging painfully behind. But it’s moving. And moving, I think, in really impressive ways.

How has the change been understood in the Orthodox Jewish community?

We’ve gone from homosexuality being a demonic evil, to an sinful proclivity, to curable illness and finally to an aspect of the human condition. In the early 1970s there was little understanding of homosexuality as a phenomenon. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a broadly accepted contemporary Orthodox halachic decisor of the period, constructed a very dark portrayal of homosexuality. For him, there was no such thing as a human sexual desire of this sort; same-sex desire was a regressive viciousness, an active rebellion against God, humanity and nature to destroy civilization.

Later Orthodox authorities, especially as people began to come out to them, rejected the demonic view. Homosexual desire was deemed unfortunate, rather than vicious, but acting upon it was still sharply prohibited. It was a short distance from this view to explain same-sex desire as a curable mental illness. Following in the footsteps of some in the Christian community in the 1980s, the Jewish community created “reparative therapy” programs of various sorts. It took nearly 20 years for the Orthodox community to face the facts, but finally in December of 2012 the Rabbinical Council America removed all reference to such programs and effectively rejected reparative therapy, which had been a cornerstone of their approach to the challenges of homosexuality.

Presently, most Orthodox environments are split between moving carefully toward empathy and decidedly not toward embrace. There is a growing sense in the Orthodox community that homosexuality is just the way some of us are made. This realization has been best expressed best by Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky in Los Angeles, who wrote in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal last year “that it is likely that homosexuality is a feature of the human condition” and that as such we shouldn’t make gay and lesbian people pay the emotional and physical prices for our theological comfort. Few Orthodox rabbis are brave enough to say this or write it publicly, but many of Kanefsky’s colleagues agree with him in theory and some are, without fanfare or announcement, already constructing policy on the foundations of such a sensibility.

That kind of transformation occurred in 45 years. That arc is quite dramatic. And it’s still in motion.

See full article.

The Canadian Jewish News

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 01:14:26 +0000

LGBTQ Jews need a place in community

In 1952, my dad was a popular senior on his high school football team and my mother was a recent immigrant from war-torn France. It was my father’s protective instinct that caused him to intervene one day to help a newly arrived French girl navigate their American high school, an instinct, among others, that eventually led to their marriage.

My mother was among 1,300 children who survived World War II in the French countryside, where, at great risk to themselves, three non-Jewish French families opened their doors to my mother after her father had been taken to Auschwitz and her mother could no longer protect her.

Over the years, it has become clear to me that the value of hachnasat orchim (welcoming the stranger) is an existential one for me personally. But I have also come to understand that it is an orchestrating value of Jewish identity.

Among all the many duties of kindness that Maimonides records, he deemed welcoming the stranger the most important. Such was the nature, he claims, of Abraham and Sarah, whose commitment to opening doors to the vulnerable stranger is embedded in our cultural DNA. Maimonides teaches that expressions of kindness – like dowering a poor bride, visiting the sick and burying the dead – are fulfilments of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

While in many liberal environments, acceptance is common, in Orthodox communities, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people are terrified to speak honestly about their feelings. Many have been told by their religious authorities: you are not wanted. You cannot have aliyot, or lead services, or bring your children to the youth program, or join formally, or in some cases even walk through the door. You are just too strange. Your difference scares us. You might affect our children. Please leave.

This is not the tent of Abraham and Sarah. This is like the city of Sodom, of which the midrash says there was a bed for the weary stranger – if he was too short, the bed turned into a rack to stretch him; and if he was too tall, it cut off his feet. Too many of us have felt stretched to the point of breaking by the normative social expectations, and cut off at the ankles by people’s fears.

Four years ago, a group of us created Eshel, an organization named after Abraham’s bright flowering tree that signaled to travellers sanctuary and care. It is dedicated to embracing LGBTQ traditional Jews and working to inspire Abrahamic welcome in Orthodox communities across North America.

In the past several years, a new empathy has begun to transform Orthodox communities. Slowly and steadily, Orthodox LGBTQ individuals in their teens and 20s are choosing to be upfront and honest with their families and communities about their sexual orientation and gender expression. In so doing, they are changing the face of Orthodox Judaism. Some of us are finding committed partnerships, making families and seeking Orthodox communities where we can be members. This is challenging religious leaders and their congregations to navigate halachic considerations and group fears that can make any difference feel too risky to embrace.

My great-grandmother on my father’s side did just that in the 1940s. Hannah Greenberg and Grandpa Max left Romania in 1923, settled first in Winnipeg and then moved to McKees Rocks, Pa., where they joined the little Orthodox shul. A few years later, Hannah joined the board and, as the family story goes, when a poor man, Mr. Rive, reputed to be a Communist, could not pay his dues the board decided to bar him from attendance on the High Holidays. Hannah would have none of it. “If there’s no room for Mr. Rive,” she announced, “then there’s no room for me.”

The next week she founded what was lovingly called “The Rebel Shul.” She bought two Torahs with her own money and ran the minyan for seven years, baking rugelach and serving matches herring to lure the men to shul on time.

These are the values that mark true faith and piety. No one is locked out, stripped of membership. No one is asked to leave due to irrational fear, political liability or social discomfort.

Right now, LGBTQ teenagers in your community are wondering whether there will be a place for them. There are presently a few – at most a dozen – Orthodox shuls in the world where LGBTQ people and their families have been fully embraced. In the next five years, Eshel is aiming to help generate 36 “Rebel Shuls” across North America where young LGBTQ Orthodox Jews can imagine a good life lived in community. It may not be easy, but the ethic of fearless welcome that made heaven swoon for Abraham and Sarah is also life saving for the vulnerable, and defining of our very nature.

Rabbi Steven Greenberg is author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, and the founder and co-director of Eshel, an Orthodox LGBT community support and education organization. Steve lives with his partner Steven Goldstein and his daughter Amalia in Boston.

See full article.

Leslee Komaiko

Miryam Kabakov — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 01:13:26 +0000

A new resource for LGBT Jews

by Leslee Komaiko

In 2009, nine years into Shelby Ilan-Pacheco’s marriage to her husband, she came to know with certainty something she had felt for so long. She was gay. But knowing this and doing something about it, doing anything, really, were two different things.

“I was paralyzed,” recalled the Valley Village resident, whose two children were very young at the time. “I didn’t know what to do with my life. I had a support system, but I didn’t have a huge circle of friends in the gay community.” She considered going to the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. But, she said, “I was afraid to go by myself. I also wanted that Jewish community.”

She reached out to the Los Angeles-based JQ International, which serves the Jewish LGBT community. They helped her find a Jewish mental health professional. And Ilan-Pacheco started attending JQ’s Shabbat dinners and special events regularly.

“It gave me a sense of calm, peace and community,” she said.

Last month, inspired by stories like Ilan-Pacheco’s, and hundreds of calls over the years from LGBT Jews and their family members seeking support, JQ International launched a warmline (855-574-4577), which is more or less a hotline, but with limited hours — in this case, about 10 hours a week (although JQ hopes to expand those hours in the future). Theirs is a free service available to anyone who self-identifies as LGBT and Jewish, as well as their family members and loved ones. Callers can remain anonymous and are also welcome to email (warmline@jqinternational.org).

The birth of the warmline, and in particular, the involvement of Rabbi Rachel Bat-Or, who is also a marriage and family therapist, began serendipitously. On the day last year that Bat-Or was scheduled to talk with JQ executive director Asher Gellis and board member Janelle Eagle about how she might get involved with the organization, Gellis received a phone call en route to the meeting.

“It was someone out of state who was concerned about her son,” recalled Bat-Or. “She had put ‘Jewish’ and ‘gay’ into the computer and came up with our phone number. I ended up talking to her and had the experience of how needed the warmline was.”

Shortly thereafter, representing JQ and the dream of a warmline, Bat-Or applied to The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ social entrepreneurship program, PresenTenseLA, and was selected as one of 11 fellows. The eight-month part-time program, which paired her with both a coach and a mentor, culminated on May 21. And that evening, at PresenTenseLA’s Launch Night, a splashy event held at the Pacific Design Center, the warmline officially became a reality. A $30,000 grant from Federation to JQ helped to set up the infrastructure and cover Bat-Or’s part-time salary.

The calls and emails thus far have run the gamut. “We get quite a few calls from people wanting therapists,” Bat-Or said. “We’ve also gotten calls from people who have LGBT people in their house, and they need more information on how to be welcoming.” Several calls have been from parents of LGBT Jewish teens “who are coming out or are already out and need support.” Every call, said Bat-Or, is “on a scale of important to completely urgent. One urgent one we had was from a young man who emailed me that he was getting out of a relationship with domestic violence and needed a place to stay that night.”

While Bat-Or does not provide counseling services per se in this role, she networks with a number of other organizations and professionals — many, but not all, Jewish. In the case of the immediate needs of the young man, for instance, Bat-Or called every shelter she could find. “I was able to gather a lot of resources, which I gave him,” she said.

Some might question the need for such a niche service. There are a number of Jewish warmlines and hotlines, and several already serve the LGBT community. But, according to Gellis, there are reasons people might be reluctant to go these routes.

“The Jewish community has certainly embraced the LGBT cause as one of their major social justice issues,” Gellis said. “But it’s very new. It has not really permeated through the entire community. It’s more on an activist level. So you have individuals like myself raised in L.A. at a Conservative synagogue. I had no gay Jewish role models growing up. I thought I was going to have to make a choice between being gay or Jewish. I would not think I could turn to Jewish Family Service (JFS).” In fact, Gellis said, JFS is very LGBT-friendly, and the two organizations regularly collaborate.

“The same thing goes in reverse,” Gellis added. “It’s very hard for somebody coming from the Jewish community who is not out, who lives in L.A., to walk into the Gay & Lesbian Center in Hollywood. The chances of running into someone they know are ridiculously low. But if you’re a Persian Jew or an Orthodox Jew, that’s a terrifying thing.”

Starting in the fall, Gellis hopes to offer training sessions to people interested in manning the warmline. The goal will be to have a cadre of 20 trained volunteers committed to at least six months of service. “We’d like to have this open 30 hours a week,” he said. For now, though, it’s just Bat-Or, and she loves the work.

“It’s so gratifying,” she said. “This is my rabbinate, a project of my heart and soul. My history is, I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. I tried to come out twice, but couldn’t because of the time, and where my family was, and where my head was, and what nice Jewish girls are supposed to be. Had there been a JQ warmline, if I had ever heard the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘Jewish’ in a sentence that was positive, it would have made a world of difference. For me, every phone call is for the person calling, but also for me personally.”

As for Ilan-Pacheco, she has a good relationship with her now ex-husband. Her kids are doing great. And she just got back from her honeymoon, with her new wife.

- See more at: http://www.eshelonline.org/a-new-resource-for-lgbt-jews/#sthash.p86tuuFI.dpuf

Ha'aretz

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 01:11:55 +0000

Orthodox transgender child is shut out of shul

‘God knows I’m a girl,’ says the Midwestern teen who was shunned from her synagogue upon transitioning from Moshe to Miryam.

More than most kids, Moshe, who lived with his mom and siblings in a midsize Midwestern city with a small Orthodox community, loved going to shul.

But shortly after Moshe began preparing for his bar mitzvah, he suddenly changed. From a sunny little boy to one who was withdrawn. Depressed. His grades, which had always been excellent, plummeted.

“He wasn’t himself. I didn’t know what was going on,” says his mother, Rebecca. “He started refusing to go to shul, not seeing his friends. This happened very, very quickly over about two months.”

One day, 12-year-old Moshe stood in his mother’s bedroom and said, “‘Hashem [God] knows I’m a girl,’ going on to explain that he just couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t have a bar mitzvah, that every time he put on tzitzit [ritual fringed garment worn by men] he was lying to Hashem. It just began pouring out of him,” Rebecca recalls.

His tutor had been emphasizing that becoming bar mitzvah meant Moshe was preparing to take his place as a man in the Jewish community.

“This is when it hit him, and he couldn’t take it any more,” says his mother, adding that when Moshe “finally told us what was going on, [he] went into therapy immediately. I think I was more shocked to find out that my beautiful child with the bright and shiny neshama [soul] was contemplating suicide than I was to learn that she was a girl.”

A psychologist and a physician both concluded that Moshe was likely transgender. Moshe and Rebecca traveled to meet with Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at what is considered the leading center in the United States for transgender children: the GeMS (Gender Management Service) Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Spack gave Moshe — who is now known as Miryam — a testosterone-blocking implant. At her annual checkup with the endocrinologist this summer, shortly after she turns 14, Miryam hopes to begin hormone treatment to bring on female puberty.

Today Miryam is happy. “She has been fully transitioned living her authentic life for a year now,” says Rebecca, who decided last year not to send her daughter back to the Jewish day school.

Miryam recently finished seventh grade in a local public school, where she participates in two bands, the drama club and multiple other activities, while earning great grades. Last summer officials in the public school district, which has had other transgender students, changed Miryam’s records to identify her as female. The only people aware of her gender transition are the principal and school nurse. Everyone else knows her as a sweet-faced, bubbly girl. But Miryam can’t go on sleepovers or participate in sports that involve changing clothes in locker rooms.

“We’re praying she can get through middle school and maybe even high school,” her mother explains. “Right now she’s so happy and so social. When she was little she’d sit at a lunch table with girls, and they’d say ‘go away.’ Now she would come home from school and say, excitedly: ‘Oh my God, we were talking about hair and boys.’ She is so excited that she had a group of girlfriends she could talk with. She’s afraid of losing that. What terrifies her most is [getting] outed.”

Miryam’s happiness has also come at a cost in terms of the Jewish life of her whole family, which was nestled in the bosom of a tight-knit community where they shared Shabbat and holiday celebrations with lifelong friends.

Miryam misses it. In an interview with Haaretz, granted on the condition that her real name and identifying details not be used, she said: “[There] was a nice atmosphere where I could go study and be with friends and family. Saturday nights I used to hold the havdalah candle [used in a ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath]. I just miss those traditions.”

She added: “I really didn’t like it because I always had to sit on the men’s side of the mechitzah [divider separating male and female worshipers] and couldn’t be with the women. I liked it on Purim because on Purim I used to be able to wear a girl costume and sit with the girls, and sit with my sister’s friends all the time. I feel more comfortable around girls than guys.”

At present, however, she can’t go back to the synagogue in which she has been raised, Miryam said: “The rabbi doesn’t like me going anymore, so I can’t.”

Forced into a suit

A couple of months before Miryam was due to travel to Los Angeles, where she has spent summers with a married sister, Rebecca asked the rabbi to speak to the congregation: “We asked him to make people aware of how they should behave, not say anything ugly to her face. He heard me out, said he had no real understanding of being transgender, asked for time before we told anyone so he could have answers ready.”

Rebecca says she sent him articles and contact information for people to speak with. Weeks passed. Meanwhile, Miryam, who by now was growing her hair longer, had her ears pierced and nails painted, was pretty much a prisoner at home.

“She couldn’t ride her bike or even walk around the block. When I told the rabbi that I was going to start telling our friends, he yelled at me,” Rebecca recalls. “I was totally shocked because I had been prepared for some negativity at the beginning, but I truly thought he would advocate for Miryam. He forbade her from coming to shul. I learned that the next week his contract was up for renewal.”

But Miryam needed to get out and live her life. “In the evening I started taking her out dressed as a girl to a mall where we weren’t likely to run into anyone we knew. She loved it. She was so happy,” her mother says. “Then she would come home and she’d get so upset. It was getting harder and harder to put on boy clothes in the morning. But we needed her to wait. The school year was coming to an end. The bullying [in school] had finally stopped. She hadn’t been in shul. She felt she couldn’t lie to God, and it was too painful being on the boys’ side.”

“We decided to go to shul as a group, with close friends and their daughters. The rabbi said if we tried to enter with her it would be a ‘showdown.’ He used that word repeatedly. Then he says he wants me to call everybody I’ve talked to and tell them that I’ve jumped the gun, that we’ll address the issue when she comes back from Los Angeles,” Rebecca told Haaretz. “I said then it will be Rosh Hashanah. He said she couldn’t come for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, there was no way he was seeing that she’d ever be able to come for davening [prayer].”

That experience involved a painful realization for Rebecca and Miryam and their family.

“There are ripples that go out across the family and the community,” Rebecca explains. “So many people are outraged by his behavior that there’s a backlash against Orthodoxy and him. When there’s just one Orthodox congregation and he won’t allow it, it makes people angry. I’ve really been shocked by how often people are upset with me for not being more upset with him.”

The rabbi declined to comment, noting only that he does not believe Rebecca’s information is accurate.

Being shut out of the synagogue that she so loved attending has been very hard on Miryam.

“I was really upset and angry, but [the rabbi] told us: ‘You can come and sit with the boys and wear a suit or just can’t come.’ I feel like I’ve been kicked out of my place where I felt comfortable,” she says. “It’s a lot to give up.”

The last time they went to their old synagogue was on Shavuot, last year. Miryam “forced herself into a suit and we went and she looked like she would cry the whole time,” Rebecca says. “She was looking around wondering who was going to hate her when they knew the truth.”

For her part, Miryam is hopeful that things will change for transgender kids. “By the time I have kids, when I’m an adult, more people will just not make such a big deal out of it,” she declares. “In each generation it’ll get better.”

See full article.

Ha’aretz

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 01:11:55 +0000

Orthodox transgender child is shut out of shul

‘God knows I’m a girl,’ says the Midwestern teen who was shunned from her synagogue upon transitioning from Moshe to Miryam.

More than most kids, Moshe, who lived with his mom and siblings in a midsize Midwestern city with a small Orthodox community, loved going to shul.

But shortly after Moshe began preparing for his bar mitzvah, he suddenly changed. From a sunny little boy to one who was withdrawn. Depressed. His grades, which had always been excellent, plummeted.

His tutor had been emphasizing that becoming bar mitzvah meant Moshe was preparing to take his place as a man in the Jewish community.

Today Miryam is happy. “She has been fully transitioned living her authentic life for a year now,” says Rebecca, who decided last year not to send her daughter back to the Jewish day school.

At present, however, she can’t go back to the synagogue in which she has been raised, Miryam said: “The rabbi doesn’t like me going anymore, so I can’t.”

Forced into a suit

That experience involved a painful realization for Rebecca and Miryam and their family.

The rabbi declined to comment, noting only that he does not believe Rebecca’s information is accurate.

Being shut out of the synagogue that she so loved attending has been very hard on Miryam.

See full article.

Ha'aretz

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 01:10:21 +0000

To be young, Orthodox and openly gay

Orthodox Jewish high schools in the United States try to balance concerns for their reputation and their students, as growing number of teens openly identify as gay.

NEW YORK — Though he had lots of friends, Amram Altzman still felt alone at Ramaz High School. As a 16-year-old sophomore at the modern-Orthodox Manhattan institution, Altzman worried about what people would think, whether they would accept him, if they knew he was gay. “Being gay and being Orthodox just wasn’t something that was talked about. It was isolating,” says Altzman, now 19 and in college.

He told his closest friends first, then his parents. Before long, almost everyone at Ramaz knew that he was gay. While there were a few negative comments, Altzman felt accepted overall. At home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, however, it was a different story. There, comments were so routinely hostile that his parents moved the family to a different community, in order to take Amram and his younger siblings out of an environment they felt could alienate their sons from Judaism altogether. And while Altzman says that he was embraced by both his friends and his family, he wishes that Ramaz handled the issue of homosexuality differently, framing it not as a sin and a chosen lifestyle, but rather as an identity.

Like a growing number of students, the topic of homosexuality is beginning to come out at Orthodox high schools in the United States. Until very recently, the norm for gay Orthodox Jews was to come out in college or later. But for a few years now there has been a marked shift. Students at Orthodox high schools who identify as gay are increasingly pushing to not only make sure that they are not overtly bullied, but also wholly accepted and able to explore what it means to be both gay and Orthodox. Now that same-sex marriage is legal in 18 U.S. states, and American attitudes are becoming, in many places, far more accepting, the challenge to Orthodox high schools is growing.

It is complex terrain that school leaders are tentatively beginning to navigate: On the one hand they have a growing concern for the safety and emotional well-being of their students. On the other hand they face communal attitudes, which, informed by verses in Leviticus and Orthodox Jewish law, still routinely condemn homosexuality.

“There is a growing awareness in the Orthodox day-school community that GLBTQ issues need to be addressed, because these are real issues that kids and families face,” says Idit Klein, executive director ofKeshet, a Boston-based national organization devoted to working for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Jews. It recently ran a day-long workshop at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. Participating local organizations included Orthodox schools.

“Conversations are happening very, very slowly and carefully,” says Miryam Kabakov, the executive director of Eshel, a group focused on creating community for Orthodox GLBTQ Jews and their families through retreats and support groups. The organization has begun to prepare curricular materials for use in Orthodox schools.

Multiple aspects of the issue require addressing, experts say: creating safe space for students during classroom time and extracurricular activities; dealing with attitudes of the Orthodox communities of which the schools are a part, which in many places offer little but wholesale condemnation; resolving questions of accepting students with same-gender parents and faculty members who are openly gay; and tackling school administrators’ concerns about how the school will be perceived if it is open about these issues. In reality, just a handful of the most modern of modern Orthodox high schools are beginning to explore these issues.

“Many rabbis and Jewish educators have moved to a profound empathy but are not sure how to navigate that alongside a 2,000 year old prohibition and parental fear that addressing these issues will lead to unwanted behavior,” says Rabbi Steven Greenberg, coexecutive director of Eshel and the first Orthodox rabbi to publicly come out as gay.

Los Angeles’ Shalhevet High School last month brought in Eshel staff to quietly begin exploring the topic with faculty.

“We walk a very fine line,” says Rabbi Ari Segal, the head of Shalhevet, which has 180 students. “We have families in the school that would feel very strongly ‘of course we should have a GLBTQ club,’ and then families that feel strongly that an Orthodox school should not. They would frame it, ‘You wouldn’t have a Shabbat violators club.’”

While the school has not yet had out gay students or applicants with gay parents, Segal said he has explored with rabbinic authorities whether they could accept them. He says they could, while requesting that same-sex couples “not be demonstrative” at school events, he says. A girl with gender-identity questions recently graduated and has since transitioned to living as male, said Segal. He adds that she had told him, before graduating, that as long as the school did not have a GLBTQ club she wouldn’t feel totally accepted, but notes that she did address her struggle at a school poetry reading, and has since written him a letter thanking the school for its attitude.

“We’re not dealing with 25- or 30-year olds. We’re dealing with fragile adolescents going through regular adolescent life. There’s a constant tension there,” says Segal.

“Liberal Orthodox schools are concerned that if they open up this conversation then parents will think they’re not Orthodox enough for their kids,” Eshel’s Kabakov says, adding, “There is still a lot of homophobia on the ground among teachers. Even just to say the word ‘gay’ instead of ‘homosexual’ is a big deal. It’s not that they don’t want to make the school a safe place, it’s that they’re concerned about how they’re perceived.”

But attitudes toward gay and lesbian Jews are changing in some corners of the modern Orthodox world, as in America in general. “There are different responses today than there were. Orthodoxy has always mirrored what goes on in regular society. People are way more used to hearing about GLBTQ things. Gay marriage is legal in 18 states. It’s out there. In the modern Orthodox world homophobia is not as tolerated,” says Kabakov.

Keshet’s Klein also sees incremental change. “Over the years we have had many requests for individualized consultation with Orthodox educators, occasionally rabbis. These have not been public conversations, all-faculty trainings or official invitations to Keshet as we have with many other schools. These have been often driven by some incident or crisis, request for support or help,” says Klein. But, she adds, “In the last couple of years we have started to see some Orthodox day schools be willing to connect with Keshet and seek support more openly.”

As a junior at Ramaz, two years ago, Altzman asked administrators if he could start a club about GLBTQ issues. Knowing that past students had sought to start a Gay-Straight Alliance and been turned down, he framed it differently. “The administration was hesitant at first but after a lot of talks decided to approve the club,” which is called the Sexuality, Identity & Society Club. “There was a lot of talk about how to strike a balance that would support students but not ‘condone’ a lifestyle that the school could not condone,” he says.

Paul Shaviv, head of school at Ramaz High School, which has 430 students, told Haaretz, “The school has many constituencies to respect and we felt, and the students at the time and our staff all felt that that was a more appropriate and less confrontational title. I have never been in favor of sex or identity-based groupings in school. I wouldn’t have a heterosexual pride day and I don’t think I would have a homosexual pride day. I don’t think either of them are appropriate.”

Altzman says he has come to understand that the way homosexuality is framed in Orthodox schools needs to be changed. “Part of the problem is Orthodoxy in general, this narrative responding to one or two verses in Leviticus and navigating a lifestyle, which is becoming increasingly unproductive in terms of creating a meaningful way for GLBTQ people to be included,” he says. “I didn’t want to lead a crusade for or against a certain lifestyle. I came out in high school because I was hoping that my friends and teachers would be supportive. I was just interested in existing and being an average high-school student.”

His parents soon realized they needed to move. The father of one of Altzman’s friends said to their synagogue’s teen minyan that gay people being out of the closet “is an abuse of free speech,” Altzman recalls. “There were a lot of homophobic comments made in his and our presence before he came out,” says his mother, Elana Altzman, a pediatrician. “That’s just the way things are in that community.” After a guest at a mutual friend’s Shavuot meal said that homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed at kosher hotels, Elana and her husband decided to move to a new community, for the sake not only of Amram, but his three younger brothers as well. They now live in Linden, New Jersey.

If Orthodox high schools do not adopt a more embracing attitude towards gay students and families, there will be another, perhaps unanticipated cost, Elana says. “Rejection in the school undermines their religious commitment. Why should they remain observant and committed when people of authority are using that religion to push them away? What’s at stake isn’t just 5 to 10 percent of the population that happens to be gay,” she said. “It’s their siblings. Add two siblings for each gay student and you’re up to 15 percent of our Jewish kids. Why would we want to lose them? By having schools and synagogues and camps that are supportive, where gay kids feel safe, where they can count on some support, in the long run will help ensure their religious commitment.”

Though the way GLBTQ issues are addressed in Orthodox high schools is changing very slowly, there have been some significant recent shifts. Just “five or six years ago even modern Orthodox high schools were part of the problem. Homophobic things were tolerated and instituted from the schools themselves. That still goes on to a lesser extent, but now the question is safe space, not necessarily of harm,” says Mordechai Levovitz, a social worker and coexecutive director of JQY, or Jewish Queer Youth, which works with Orthodox teens in the New York area.

“Then modern Orthodox high schools were sending their kids to a conversion therapy program. The school psychologist would try to change them from being gay to straight. Their methods included having the kid repeating the verse in the Bible over and over again for 45 minutes. Looking at pictures of AIDS victims and colorectal cancer victims and say ‘this is what comes of homosexual sex.’ Kids were being traumatized. We haven’t heard that lately. Now the complaints kids have is that they don’t hear anybody from the administration using the word ‘gay’, and worry about what would happen if they come out. Orthodox high schools are starting to think proactively about it,” says Levovitz. “We’re heading in the right direction.”

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Ha’aretz

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 01:10:21 +0000

To be young, Orthodox and openly gay

Orthodox Jewish high schools in the United States try to balance concerns for their reputation and their students, as growing number of teens openly identify as gay.

Los Angeles’ Shalhevet High School last month brought in Eshel staff to quietly begin exploring the topic with faculty.

“We’re not dealing with 25- or 30-year olds. We’re dealing with fragile adolescents going through regular adolescent life. There’s a constant tension there,” says Segal.

See full article.

Kipa.co.il

Miryam Kabakov — Wed, 28 May 2014 01:08:57 +0000

Rabbi Avi Gisar: I Will Allow a Lesbian Family to Live in Ofra

By: Netael Bendel

Translated by EREZ TRANSLATIONS

Rabbanit Esti Rozenberg, dean of the Migdal Oz Academy, said, “[we need] to do everything [possible] to keep the same sex couples in the religious community”.

“I will give homosexuals an aliyah to the Torah, I will allow the lesbian family to live in Ofra…” said Rabbi Avi Gisar, the Rabbi of Ofra, at the conference titled “A family pieced together – the Jewish family in the modern world,” promoted by the religious lesbian organization “Bat Kol” in honor of “Religious Acceptance Day” at the Hartman Institute. At that conference, Rabbanit Esti Rozenberg, the dean of the Migdal Oz Academy, said, “It is clear to me that I am ready to do, as a religious individual, everything to make sure the same sex community stays in our religious community”.

A panel at the conference, organized by Bat Kol , the religious lesbian organization, demonstrated a surprising amount of restraint while observing two sensible religiously observant women making statements about same sex couples.

Rabbi Avi Gisar, the Rabbi of Ofra and chairman of the National Religious Board of Education, said at the conference that he would allow the lesbian couple to live in the settlement. “I am a man of Halacha, I cannot vouch for myself, but they say I am an Orthodox Rabbi,…” Rabbi Gisar opened his speech, “…we have a change in our understanding of a collective Jewish culture and our global expansion.” Rabbi Gisar listed a few of the changes and continued his speech explaining his fundamental approach to the participants; “We are living in a very interesting world which continues to develop its culture, and Halacha is a partner to many new paths which have been paved, including the question of fertility and parenthood, and many many other questions on this subject. The personal relation is a relationship to give worth and value to every respectable person, and my basic approach is – I very much do not like the position of the Catholic priest who is interested only in the sins of his congregants and who thinks that their confessions should be of interest to him (the priest); and that his job description, is to “rebuke or to punish or to threaten””.

“The job description of a Rabbi in my opinion is to elevate, enrich, bring his congregant closer to God, it is a job of partnership, partnering [with the congregant] in the work of G-d, and I am not interested in the private affairs of men. A man’s honor (respect) and his freedom of rights are one of the large foundation of ( Jewish ) values, I respect that. My personal tendency is to allow every man to live his life, he does not come to ask me, and if he does, I will encourage this, and this will remain personal”, Rabbi Gisar explained.

Before his remark regarding the acceptance of a lesbian couple to the settlement, The Rabbi continued and explained his position with Halacha and the “Musar” (tradition), “I have not expressed a disagreement between Halacha and “Musar” (tradition), this is because I believe that the Halacha and the “Musar” (tradition) should be parallel one to the other, and if we spoke about personal values and loving your neighbor as yourself, and the paths between friendships, this is part of Halacha, on the contrary, Halacha is very traditional and it needs to identify the tradition with Halachic traditions and vice-versa, and I think that my Halachic need is to be close, attentive and a partner in meditation and consideration as the seekers find in a letter. Together with this, my tradition and my Halachic values also place me within barriers, and my barriers are in accordance with those of both Halacha and “Musar” (tradition); my Halachic values are my traditions. It is not what I say from the point of view of Halacha, rather what you tell yourself from the point of view of Halacha.”

Rabbi Gisar continued his speech and explained his point of view with examples in comparison to homosexuality, “Do I not accept into my community those who violate the Sabbath? I accept. Do I not host those who are violating the Sabbath? We are constantly discovering issues regarding our personal values with our friends and members of our community, and with this, I do not go up to the synagogue and say ‘So-and-so has come to the synagogue on the Sabbath, so-and-so is to be blessed’. If a couple who violates the Sabbath would request that I would give them permission to violate the Sabbath, I would not go to their wedding”. When asked of Rabbi Gisar, he replied: “I will give a homosexual an aliyah to the Torah, a lesbian family is able to live in Ofra”.

In a similar vain, Rabbanit Esti Rozenberg, a student of Zionistic Torah scholars, and the daughter of HaRav Aharon Lichtenstein (Dean of the Yeshiva “Har Etzion”) said in her enlightened opening statement that she did not base her theory on the subject of Gay/Lesbian couples on a Halachic point of view, but rather from a moral point of view. “The traditional family is a pair, two parents who raise children, male and female. All of a sudden I ask myself what I am going to doing with this issue of same sex couples – etc.”, interjected the Rabbanit Rozenberg to those on the panel, “I truly want to voice two opinions, two characters which echo one another. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, as we know said, it will never happen without trying; from one side I want to know what is right and what is halachic, and from the other side to respect both.”

“I came here, and I am thankful for the chance to speak about this issue, with this conference which connects people who are going through these issues. In the end we like or do not like people who are going through this. To respect both sides is a very strong, basic value of Judaism, and in the end a strong ideology is breaking down in front of our eyes. The thing that is clearest to me is that I am ready to do, with religious value, everything possible so the same sex couple population will stay within the religious community. I want there to be an option to continue raising children with Torah values, to marriage “chupah”, and good deeds, and I want everyone in the community who come here to continue to do the work of G-d, may He be praised, and will continue to be a part of the religious community, and the only other alternative is five times more dangerous. I am ready to do whatever it takes in order that the religious community will accept within its parameters different understandings”.

The Rabbanit Rozenberg clarified a few things by saying, “I want to distinguish between two things: the family foundation, which I think is not the traditional family model, I think the main preference is that a family will be composed of a father and mother, but there is a new reality. I think that patience is key, in all practicality I am ready to concede a lot, to widen the Halachic boundaries within my congregation, I am ready to demand this change, to be patient and to explain it to my daughter.”

One last addition Rabbanit Rozenberg explained to the same-sex couples is that they must understand that the religious community is not able to conform to every new idea which it comes across. “I also think that the congregation which wants me to accept them also needs to accept me; to accept something which the religious community does not generally accept, and to find places where, with patience, will be joined together; a place where there will be an understanding that there are some who will find certain things difficult to accept. Both sides are compromising on something and must try their hardest to make it work and to be respectful of one another. There must be love and flexibility. I challenge the community of Alon Shvut to start working together and to allow a woman to say the D’var Torah in a synagogue, but I know that I should not propose that a woman receive an aliyah to the Torah. I need to challenge my community, and I know what the boundaries are. There needs to be patience and flexibility from both sides, and sometimes it will hurt me and sometimes it will hurt you. And if both the congregations are aware and know this, then they would be more flexible.”

See full article.

The Jewish Week

Miryam Kabakov — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 01:07:48 +0000

Inclusion Gets Boost Across County

As part of an ongoing effort to ensure that Westchester’s Jewish institutions are welcoming to LGBTQ Jews — and their families — Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who is the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi in nation, will be speaking at various venues in the county April 25-27.

“The weekend of April 25-27 is an opportunity for Westchester Jews of all backgrounds to meet with Rabbi Greenberg and hear him speak at one or more of a half-dozen locations in Southern Westchester on topics that include Jewish law and homosexuality, constructing your organization’s welcoming tent, and lessons from the Holocaust,” said Bina Raskin, director of Mosaic, a nonprofit organization that was founded to fully integrate LGBTQ Jews into the county’s community life.

Rabbi Greenberg’s program includes a dinner and speech at Beth El Synagogue Centerin New Rochelle, an informal dinner at a private home, a breakfast at Temple Israel of New Rochelle, a luncheon discussion at Community Synagogue of Rye co-sponsored with Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel and an evening Yom HaShoah program at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, co-sponsored with the JCC of Mid-Westchester. Other co-sponsors of the weekend’s activities include Mosaic of Westchester, Community Synagogue of Rye, Westchester Jewish Community Services and Westchester Jewish Council.

Rabbi Greenberg, a senior teaching fellow at CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a think tank, leadership-training institute and resource center, is also the director of the CLAL Diversity Project. He also serves as co-director of Eshel, an organization that focuses on the integration of Orthodox LGBTQ Jews into their families and communities.

www.mosaicofwestchester.org

See full article.