This group is for Orthodox Jewish parents with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children seeking peer support. We will also discuss ways to help parents and families navigate in their communities and to become advocates for their children.

This group meets by phone conference call at 8 PM CT/ 9 PM EST on the first Wednesday of each month. If you are interested in participating, please contact us to for a brief intake and to receive the call-in number: miryam@eshelonline.org

Confidentiality: Everyone is asked to keep what they hear in the group completely confidential. Participants should feel free to use a pseudonym.

Eshel Recognized in Slingshot Guide

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Eshel is to be named one of North America’s top 82 innovative Jewish organizations in the tenth annual Slingshot Guide. The Guide has become a go-to resource for volunteers, activists and donors looking for new opportunities and projects that, through their innovative nature, will ensure the Jewish community remains relevant and thriving.

Selected from among hundreds of finalists reviewed by 112 professionals with expertise in grant-making and Jewish communal life, Eshel caught the Guide’s attention for its work reshaping the role of LGBTQ Jews in the Orthodox community and providing hope for a better future for the women, men, and teens that it serves.

Organizations included in this year’s Guide were evaluated on their innovative approach, the impact they have in their work, the leadership they have in their sector, and their effectiveness at achieving results. Eshel is proud to be one of the six organizations serving the LGBTQ community honored in the Guide for meeting those standards. See the page!

November 14-15th, 2014

Stay tuned for more information coming your way or get in touch to get involved:  info@eshelonline.org

January 16-18, 2015 — Isabella Freedman Retreat Center, 116 Johnson Road, Falls Village, CT 06031

During this annual weekend LGBT Orthodox Jews come together to celebrate, learn, and to build this growing community.

Who is this for?

Orthodox or traditional LGBT Jews. We also welcome formerly Orthodox, Ortho-curious and anyone who wants to experience a traditional Shabbat with other LGBT Jews.

The program!

Our retreats draw from the many talents of our participants. We explore a wide range of topics in different modalities, including text study, topics on identity, learning new songs, skills training, and more.

Have something to teach? Let us know what you would like to share with the rest of the participants by filling out this short form.

Registration and Pricing

All prices include full room and board. Registration opens up a few months prior to the retreat. Have questions now? Contact info@eshelonline.org

Financial Aid

We are committed to making our weekends as inclusive and accessible as possible. We provide a limited amount of financial aid available for those who, for financial reasons, cannot otherwise attend.

Be an Eshel Angel!

If you are able to donate funds to enable people to come to the retreat, please donate here. Your contribution is greatly appreciated and will go to those who cannot afford to attend.

Halachic Information

All food will be strictly kosher, the retreat will be shomer shabbos, and we will have traditional davening/prayer. We will offer a variety of learning options, from traditional text study to experiential workshops covering a wide variety of subjects.

Transportation

Transportation to and from the retreat is at your own expense. Eshel will try to assist you in finding transportation to and from the weekend.

For directions and transportation information, please visit the Isabella Freedman website.

Confidentiality Policy

Some participants may not be out as LGBT in their daily lives, or may have other important reasons for keeping their attendance at the event confidential. You have affirmed that you WILL NOT POST OR DISTRIBUTE PHOTOGRAPHS or audio/video recordings of other attendees publicly unless you have the EXPLICIT permission of every attendee represented therein. This includes distribution or posting online on flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites, as well as anywhere else in which photographs and other representations are publicly available.

Refund Policy

Participants who cancel their registration more than 2 weeks before an event are eligible for a refund less a $25 processing fee. Participants who cancel within the last two weeks prior to an event receive a 100% credit toward a future retreat less a $25 processing fee. If you cancel less than 72 hours before the start of the retreat or leave the retreat early no refund or credit is available.

Questions?
Please email us at info@eshelonline.org. Please help us spread the word about the retreat!

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

April 17-19, 2015 — Capital Retreat Center, 12750 Buchanan Trail East Waynesboro, PA 17268

Who is this for?

*Orthodox or Traditional Jewish parents and adult family members of LGBT Jews.

The program for the weekend will be designed primarily for parents and adult relatives such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles or other adults important to the LGBT family member.

A few of the participants at the 2014 gathering

Where will it be?

The retreat will be at the Capital Retreat Center in Waynesboro, PA. Visit the website at www.capitalretreat.org or call (717) 794-2177 for more information. This is a first-class, full-service hospitality campus close to BWI and PHL airports and a one-hour drive from Baltimore, Md. and Washington, DC. We will have exclusive use of Nesiyah Lodge and will be dining and meeting in our own area to ensure privacy.

What will happen at this weekend?

This weekend will build a community of Orthodox and Traditional Jewish parents and relatives of LGBT children. We will create a comfortable place to share and learn with mutual support for discovering new ways to approach our children. Sessions will address having an LGBT family member in our families and in the Orthodox communities of which we are a part.

Is this for me?

Whether you are fully accepting of your LGBT child or struggling to accept them, this is the place for you. No judgments will be made about any retreat participant’s attitudes or levels of acceptance of their LGBT child. We only ask that each attendee agree to respect other participants’ feelings and attitudes.

Getting there:

For getting to the retreat site, please visit the retreat website to find out information about train, airplane and car travel to and from the retreat center. Transportation to and from the retreat is at your own expense.

Registration and Pricing:

All prices include full room and board. We strive to not to turn anyone away for lack of funds! Please inquire if this retreat presents a financial challenge.

Be an Eshel Angel!

If you are able to donate funds to enable someone who cannot otherwise attend the retreat, please click here. Your contribution is greatly appreciated and will make this retreat a reality for someone else.

Food/Kashrut

All Capital Retreat Center food is under strict Star-K Kashrut supervision, using only Glatt Kosher meats and Cholov Yisroel dairy products.

Produce is sourced from local farmers for the freshest ingredients. The facility is nut-free. Capital Retreat Center strives to accommodate almost every dietary need possible.

Shabbat Observance:

The weekend program will be fully Shomer Shabbos (Sabbath Observant). Retreat participants agree to respect others’ religious beliefs and practices. We do ask that everyone keep the laws of Shabbos according to Orthodox practice in public areas.

The entire facility is enclosed in an eruv.

Davening/Prayer:

There will be a traditional prayer service/minyan.

CONFIDENTIALITY POLICY:
Some participants may have important reasons for keeping their attendance at the Shabbaton confidential. You have affirmed that you WILL NOT POST OR DISTRIBUTE PHOTOGRAPHS or audio/video recordings of other attendees publicly unless you have the EXPLICIT permission of every attendee represented therein. This includes distribution or posting online on flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites, as well as anywhere else in which photographs and other representations are publicly available.

CANCELLATION POLICY:
Participants who cancel their registration more than 2 weeks before an event are eligible for a refund less a $25 processing fee. Participants who cancel within the last two weeks prior to an event receive a 100% credit toward a future retreat less a $25 processing fee. If you cancel less than 72 hours before the start of the retreat or leave the retreat early no refund or credit is available.

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.

See full article.

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