Whole Self Movement

Brook Wilensky-Lanford interviews Rabbi Becky Silverstein for Guernica Magazine

The transgender rabbi on religious rituals, gender fluidity, and the language of LGBTQ inclusion.

The first thing you learn about Rabbi Becky Silverstein is that despite the “Becky,” he uses male pronouns. Upon meeting him, you might see what he calls “a female-bodied person” wearing clothing typically associated with men: jackets, slacks, a snazzy tie. That Becky is a “he” is the occasion for a small instant of cognitive dissonance. For Rabbi Silverstein, it’s appropriate that this moment is generated first in language, as that’s how his own process of identifying as a genderqueer person began, during conversations with mentors at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.

For Silverstein, it’s also fitting that gender identity begins with semantics, because the work of a rabbi is one of active engagement with the rich canon of Jewish texts. The Torah, as well as the countless scholarly commentaries about it, wrestles deeply with the problems of language. A rabbi must embrace such debate, parsing differences in meaning between Hebrew and English, as well as between ancient cultural conceptions and modern ideas. In Silverstein’s view, conversation is a crucial tool for contemporary American Judaism to fully recognize, understand, and welcome transgender Jews into the community, starting with the same talks the nation is having about gay and transgender rights, as well as women’s equality. All of these battles for inclusion, he argues in the interview that follows, are linked: “Misogyny is at the root of all homophobia and transphobia. It’s no surprise that a movement that still struggles with the place of women would also struggle with the place of LGBTQ-identified folks.”

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Duo Benches Today’s Bentsher

A new egalitarian, LGBT-friendly version of the little post-meal book

By Brigit Katz for Tablet Magazine

 David Zvi Kalman and Joshua Schwartz are on a mission to restore a little booklet to its former glory. When bentshers, small scale pamphlets containing the Hebrew Grace After Meals, were first printed 500 years ago, they were large volumes lovingly adorned with woodcuts, engravings, and intricate drawings. Today, they have mostly been reduced to flimsy little things doled out as party favors at Jewish weddings.

“Jewish weddings are the worst thing to ever happen to bentshers!” according to Kalman. “Because bentshers are now mass-produced, there’s a push to make them smaller, and a push to make them cheaper. They’ve become much more utilitarian texts, and much less an object of beauty.”

At the end of October, Kalman and Schwartz—doctoral students at Penn and NYU, respectively—will release the second edition of Seder Oneg Shabbos, a visually arresting, meticulously designed bentsher that harks back to an earlier time in Jewish history. The book also contains a modern twist: “egalitarian and queer-inclusive language.”

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Finding LGBT pride in Chanukah

by Ryan Torok for JewishJournal.com

 Fifteen years ago, Stephen Sass and his husband, Steven Hochstadt, consecrated their commitment to each other during a religious marriage ceremony that took place during Chanukah. The timing was intentional.

“Chanukah has always resonated deeply for me as a Jew and as a gay man, since it commemorates one of the earliest fights for freedom of conscience, and celebrates the right to be different and to express one’s individual and communal identity as a member of a minority group within larger society,” Sass said.

The holiday of Chanukah celebrates the Maccabees’ military victory over the Seleucid rulers of Judea during the second century B.C.E. It also commemorates the miracle that occurred when the Jews rededicated their Temple, and a vessel of consecrated oil — enough for only one day — somehow lasted eight.

Perhaps less known are the ways that the holiday — with its themes of pride, identity and fighting for your right to be who you are — has connected with the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community. On Nov. 18 and 19, the New York-based transdenominational Big Tent Judaism/Jewish Outreach Institute held classes locally that, among other things, highlighted the connections between Chanukah and the LGBT story.

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Stories for Love

A blog for the global LGBTQIA+ community
 

“I was born female and raised as a girl. My Jewish history is kind of complicated, but from the age of six on, I grew up in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. That community is extremely binary. You are either a boy or a girl, and you sit in your designated place at synagogue, school, or camp. So I grew up in a very segregated community where I was always with the girls. I felt from a very young age that I should have been a boy, and wished I was a boy. I didn’t know that it was even a possibility because I was very sheltered from the media; though back then there wasn’t much in the media anyway about LGBT at all. When I was 21, I met a transgender person for the first time. He was actually also a Jew. Someone told me “that person used to be a girl,” and my mind was blown. I realized that I would be transgender if I wasn’t orthodox. I really believed that god doesn’t make mistakes, and this must be the thing I have to work through and force myself through in my life. That was the message I was always given growing up. I went to therapy, and my therapist who was an orthodox Jew encouraged me to get manicures on a weekly basis and we did a lot of inner-child work and talked about the possibility of sexual abuse. All these things are okay, but at the end of the day it didn’t change the fact that I had gender dysphoria and felt uncomfortable in the gender I was assigned at birth. Between the ages of 20 and 25 I essentially came out as bisexual, and was perceived to be a lesbian because I looked really masculine. I was then out for a little while as gender queer, and then finally came out to myself as transgender in 2007. I began the process of transitioning that summer, and have been living happily ever after even since.”

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Two Hanukkah Children’s Books for the Jewish LGBT Community

From Cheril N. Clarke's Blog


Chances are if you’re a gay or lesbian Jewish couple, you will be hard-pressed to find books that reflect your family—especially children’s stories and young adult fiction. You may find two or three titles if you’re lucky, but certainly not much more. This holiday season LGBT publisher My Family! is introducing two new history-making books that will accelerate the process of building a virtuous library (and legacy) for Jewish LGBT families.

The first of the two books being released is “The Wonderful Adventures of Benjamin and Solomon,” a tale of two scholars who get more adventure on one snowy night than they could dream of. Set in medieval Europe, this fairytale is penned by new author, Elena Yakubsfeld of Greenwich, CT. This book is for young adults.

“Benjamin and Solomon are not just students,” says publisher Cheril Bey-Clarke. “They are two young men whose intimate love for each other is as strong as any other couple. On their quest to recover a stolen prayer they trek through a magical forest, encounter dragons and confront angry knights in a towering castle. They are essentially gay, Jewish heroes and quite frankly there is no other story like this. We’re thrilled to work with the author to bring it to the community!” Accented with lively illustrations and playful dialog, this title explores Jewish history, devotion to God, and non-traditional ideas of family.

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OPINION: LGBTQIQ Jews Under the Rainbow

By Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah of Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue

Pride. Nowadays, all you have to do is say the word, and people immediately recognise it as shorthand for ‘LGBT Pride’.

So, what is LGBT?

On lesbian and gay pride demonstrations in the 1970s and early 1980s, the most common badge on display was the ‘pink triangle’ – in memory of the persecution of gay men by the Nazis. And then, by the late 1980s the ‘rainbow flag’, first designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker of San Francisco (which you can read about HERE) , had become the dominant emblem, proclaiming, an alliance of solidarity, encompassing ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ people – hence: LGBT.

While ‘bisexual’ challenges binary assumptions concerning sexual orientation, the inclusion of ‘transgender’ acknowledges the more fundamental issue of gender.

For years, lesbians and gay men had been asserting that being lesbian and gay was not just about who you ‘slept with’, and had been presenting ourselves in ways that challenged binary ‘female’/’male’ gender stereotypes. Now, those whose main concern was gender rather than sexuality were coming to the fore.

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How To Hire a Trans Rabbi

By Jordyn Rozensky for MyJewishLearning.com

Creating inclusive Jewish spaces is a great goal—but how do you do it? While the answer is likely different for every synagogue, school, and youth group, it’s helpful and encouraging to hear about others’ successes, triumphs, and their lessons learned. Take a look at this story of Tachlis of Inclusion, which we hope you find inspiring as we prepare for Transgender Day of Remembrance. Be sure to check out other stories of gender in our Jewish community including: “Transgender 101,” our look at the importance of voting, and the personal reflections of two parents looking at gender roles at daycare.
For the Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center (PJTC), hiring Rabbi Becky Silverstein as their Education Director just made sense. A recent graduate of Hebrew College, Rabbi Silverstein brought the knowledge, the passion, and the training that the position required. He won over the board, the staff, and the community.

What made things just a little bit complicated was the fact that Rabbi Silverstein is transgender—and one of the very few openly transgender rabbis in America.

Keshet has talked with Rabbi Silverstein before to get his perspective on the learning curve associated with being, as a rabbi, a public transgender figure. For Rabbi Silverstein, “As a person who identifies as trans and genderqueer and whose pronoun (intentionally) creates dissonance with my name, I try and remember that those whom I am encountering may be going through their own process. This requires approaching everyone with compassion and an ear to understanding where they are so that I can respond appropriately.” 

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Celebrating a Same Sex Wedding with Ancient Traditions - A Jewish Wedding Story

When Margee and her partner decided to get married, it was important to them to have a traditional Jewish wedding, despite the obvious nontraditional part of their wedding - they were two women planning a gay marriage. It took a lot of conversations to decide why and how to use traditional, Hebrew, religious language as a way to affirm their unique place in the Jewish community.







This is part of the Jewish Lifecycles series by G-dcast. Watch more than 20 other pieces about rituals - old and new

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For LGBT Orthodox Jews, Growth of Social Media Creates a Safe Space Online

Websites, blogs, Facebook groups, and online support groups offer the chance to connect without the risk of ‘going public’

By Michael Orbach for Tablet Magazine


Growing up in an ultra-Orthodox family in Brooklyn in the 1970s, Moshe struggled with his homosexuality. “I went to yeshiva and there were no gay characters on television,” said Moshe, who asked that we not use his real name. There was no discussion of gay issues at the yeshiva, either, he remembers: Everyone was implicitly taught that the only way to channel their sexuality was to get married—to women, of course. At 22, Moshe did just that, hoping he could “marry the gay away.” “We dated for 12 days,” he recalled. That was in 1994, before the popular advent of the Internet. At the time, Moshe didn’t realize there were other Orthodox men grappling with their sexuality, too.

The online universe changed all that. A few years ago, he began reading blogs about other Orthodox gay men who were coming out. While he was still unable to confront his sexuality publicly, he felt he needed to connect with other people in similar situations—something the Internet allowed him to do without “going public.” “I was able to see people expressing themselves—Orthodox friends of mine expressing themselves with their homosexuality, and I wanted that,” he told me. “I needed that.”

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Twelve Topics: Start An Orthodox Conversation About LGBT Jews

By Anonymous for The Jewish Week

We are a group of many dozens of observant, Orthodox families from across the United States, including Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

We are just like most of you – with one exception: Our children are LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender). Each of our children told us on a fateful day some months or years ago that they are not heterosexual. It is who they are and who they will always be.

It is with this thought in mind that we would like to have a virtual conversation with you. Imagine yourselves sitting around the Shabbat table. You have just finished Kiddush and are about to eat. Think about the statements below and how you would respond or comment. Just pick a few, and begin. That’s what most of us did with our families – slowly, carefully, needing time to absorb and appreciate the circumstances and the people around us.

1. As Orthodox Jews we believe that all human beings are created in the image of God. Have you considered how this core Jewish principle of human dignity might shape your view of LGBT people?

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Rabbi Gil Steinlauf of Adas Israel Comes Out as Gay

Married Rabbi Tells Washington D.C. Congregation in Letter

By Gabrielle Birkner for The Jewish Daily Forward


(JTA) — Rabbi Gil Steinlauf struggled for decades with an identity that he only acknowledged publicly this week.

On the Monday after Yom Kippur, Steinlauf, the married senior rabbi at Adas Israel — a large and historic Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. — announced that he is gay. In a letter sent to congregants, Steinlauf wrote:

With much pain and tears, together with my beloved wife, I have come to understand that I could walk my path with the greatest strength, with the greatest peace in my heart, with the greatest healing and wholeness, when I finally acknowledged that I am a gay man. Sadly, for us this means that Batya and I can no longer remain married, despite our fidelity throughout our marriage and our abiding friendship and love. As our divorce is not born of rancor, we pray that together with our children we will remain bound by a brit mishpachah, a covenant of family.

Even as a child, Steinlauf recognized a “difference” in himself, he wrote, but never let that difference define him or his choice of a spouse. Steinlauf has been married for 20 years to Rabbi Batya Steinlauf, Director of Social Justice and Interfaith Initiatives at the Jewish Community Relations Council. The Steinlaufs, seen in the video below at a July “Stand Strong With Israel” rally, have three children.

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When Will Orthodoxy be Ready for Me?

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

I’ve written about the successes and shortcomings of my fourteen years of Modern Orthodox day school education before, from religious, secular, and Zionist perspectives. I’ve also written about the thought processes behind my decisions to leave the Modern Orthodox world and join — at least for now — egalitarian communities that fall more in line with my (ever-evolving) vision of what my Jewish community should be.

The way I saw (and still see) it, my decision to leave the (Modern) Orthodox world was not one of choice, but of necessity. And, perhaps, it was also a reaction to the ultra-Orthodox community of my youth, a community which ultimately cut off all ties to my family after I was outed as queer, a community which had, previously, told my mother, a pediatrician, not to answer pages from non-Jewish patients on Shabbat, and where I was ridiculed for attending a co-educational high school and not wearing a black hat. Yet I still find myself inexplicably drawn to the Modern Orthodox world.

My decision to leave came not out of choice, but out of the realization that, right now, I do not and cannot exist in the context of Orthodox Judaism. As a queer person, most Modern Orthodox rabbis would not allow me to marry another man. Orthodox Judaism is nowhere near close to finding ways to include (or even recognize, despite the fact that the Talmud readily does so) the existence of those who identify outside of the gender binary. It allows for less, if any, literary criticism of the Bible and historical contextualization of rabbinic codes of law, and is frightened to think critically about God.

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“A Wider Bridge” Connects American Jewish LGBTs with Israel’s LGBT Community

by Rabbi John Rosove for JewishJournal.com

“At Temple Israel of Hollywood, a true Reform congregation, I am blessed to say that a gay, pregnant, female rabbi is no more out of place on the bima than any of my colleagues!”

So declared my colleague, Rabbi Jocee Hudson, on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in a sermon in which she described both the changes that Reform Judaism has undergone that have opened the door to a wider diversity of Jews, and the challenges facing Jewish life anew in the 21st century. Rabbi Hudson noted that going forward the American Jewish community will need to open its doors even wider and be even more inclusive than we have ever been before to welcome Jews and their families, and to continue to rethink how we pray, how we learn and think about Torah, about the meaning of “community”, how we engage with the people and state of Israel, and about how we recommit ourselves to social justice work here and abroad.

Rabbi Hudson was quick to say that despite the need for ongoing change, such “revolutionary challenges” are, truth to tell, nothing really new in Jewish history and tradition.

That being said, our community has, indeed, changed dramatically in the last fifty years of American Jewish history. One of the most significant changes is the leadership role women have taken as rabbis, cantors, scholars, thinkers, and communal leaders. A second significant change involves the ever-emerging presence of LGBT Jews and Jewish leaders in our congregations thus helping us redefine the meaning of "family" in contemporary Jewish life.

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Israeli Comedy Scores Points by Bringing Together Soccer and Gay Politics

In the movie ‘Kicking Out Shoshana,’ a popular athlete pretends to be gay. The result is both funny and surprisingly meaningful.

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

It’s been an eventful summer for Beitar Jerusalem. In June, after several young Israelis brutally murdered an Arab teenager in retaliation for the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish youths, police sources suggested that the killers were members of La Familia, a small group of several thousand fans of the iconic Israeli soccer club who are known for their extreme right-wing views and their love of violence. Shortly thereafter, when Israeli soldiers entered Gaza and peaceniks in Tel Aviv and elsewhere took to the streets to demonstrate for peace, La Familia’s minions, some wearing their favorite club’s jerseys, were caught on camera confronting the demonstrators with their fists. And then, just as Beitar seemed to be irredeemably affiliated with the actions of its most vile followers, came Kicking Out Shoshana.

The movie, a comedy released late last month, tells the story of Ami Shoshan, a star player for Bnei Jerusalem. The team is a thinly veiled version of Beitar, and Shoshan is a thinly veiled take on the prototypical Israeli baller, all machismo and chest hair and rogue charm. That charm gets him in the good graces of Mirit, played by the future Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot. But Mirit is a big-time gangster’s girl, and her boyfriend, armed and unamused, gives Shoshan a choice: Suffer a very painful removal of a key part of his anatomy, or convene a press conference and tell the entire world he is gay.

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Gay & Lesbian Adoption

With more gays and lesbians starting families, same-sex Jewish couples are faced with myriad challenges

By Jane Calem Rosen for Kveller.com
When Wayne Steinman and his partner Sal Lacullo brought four-month-old Hope with them to High Holy Day services at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York's Greenwich Village, they opened the floodgates to parenthood for New York City's gay and lesbian community. In 1987, as part of the first gay couple to openly adopt a baby in the city, Steinman recalled the reaction of friends in the congregation that day. "It was a 'Wow!'" he said. No one really thought about having grandchildren before," he said.

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This Was Not the Year I Set Out to Have (Rosh Hashanah)

By Meir Hoberman for Keshetonline.org
The author explores the story of Hagar and Ishmael being cast out into the wilderness and God opening Hagar’s eyes to the well that was before her. He then shares his own story of coming out and how unpredictable life can be.

This comes from the Torah Queeries collection

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Why This Dad Smothers His Daughter with Love

By Jason Menayan for Raising Kvell

Although I’m not a mother nor a daughter myself, I enjoyed Jordana Horn’s recent review of “The Jewish Daughter Diaries” in her post, “Do Jewish Moms Smother Their Kids With Too Much Love?” While some of the book’s authors’ have their gripes with overbearing, meddlesome mothers, I’d like to repeat Horn’s statement that you can never love a child too much.

My mother says I was a very sensitive child. She guesses that it was because I was gay. That might very well be true, but I do know that my parents’ response to my sensitivity wasn’t right. In their attempt to help me develop thicker skin, they didn’t kiss or hug me, or tell me that they loved me.

And I felt unloved.

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7 young feminist role models you should know

By Suzanna on Feministing.com 

Jazz

Jazz is a transgender girl advocate who has shared her story with the world since 2007 with a 20/20 Barbara Walters special. Jazz and her family started the Transkids Purple Rainbow Foundation — an organization that offers resources and advice to trans kids and their families. For those of us who have been following Jazz’s activism for some years, it is very exciting to see her starting to branch off into social media on her own — as seen here with her YouTube “Letter to the World.” Jazz inspires us with her eloquence and charisma, but we also are thrilled to see that she’s still comfortable goofing around.




 

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Israel’s Second Largest City Named as Best Gay Travel Spot

Tel Aviv Takes Top Honours in Online Poll

By: Leonard Carl for ShalomLife.com

The Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been named as the best gay travel destination of 2011.
Israel’s second largest city came first on an online poll sponsored by American Airlines and Gaycities.com by garnering 43% of the vote, followed by New York’s 14 percent, Toronto’s seven percent and London’s 5 percent.

Tel Aviv hosted approximately 5,000 gay tourists in June for the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade, an increase of over 25 percent from the previous year.

"This year, we estimate that this number will double," city council member Yaniv Waizman said in a statement.

Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai took the victory as a sign that his city's reputation continues as one that "respects all people and allows everyone to live according to his/her own principles. Ours is a city in which everyone can be proud of who they are."

Huldai added that the city's Gay Center has received roughly NIS 500,000 a year for the last three years since 2008, while Gay Pride Week and various nonprofit associations also receive funding from the municipality.

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Gender Through a Jewish Lens

New memoirs by transgender authors Kate Bornstein and Joy Ladin illustrate the power of religion to shape how people construct their identities

By Raphael Magarik for Tablet Magazine

You might expect transgender Jews to see Jewish law and tradition as constricting or limiting, full of static categories and lines that must not be crossed. But two new memoirs by male-to-female transsexuals suggest otherwise: Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger and Joy Ladin’s Through the Door of Life use Jewish tropes and themes to explore the authors’ identities, with surprising results.

For Bornstein and Ladin alike, Jewish boundaries around sex and weird gender hang-ups—whether the pressures of passing Jewish manhood between generations, or God’s sexless aphysicality—provide productive language for expressing transgender experience. Bornstein is an award-winning writer, performer, and queer activist, whose sprawling memoir chronicles a journey across continents, religious traditions, and (many, many) partners. The pained Jewish masculinity of Bornstein’s youth formed the backdrop for an eventual embrace of Scientology; though she may not intend this, it also helps explain and frame her subsequent rejection of Scientology.

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For Transgender Jews, a Visit to the Western Wall Holds Unique Symbolism

Praying on the side with their chosen gender is a quiet political statement for some, and a personal milestone for others

By Daniella Peled for Tablet Magazine

Transgender activist Surat Knan, who is currently transitioning from a female to male identity, visited Jerusalem’s Western Wall last November to pray on the men’s side. “I was very nervous, but elated,” said the London-based founder of the LGBT group Rainbow Jews, who was prepared for a fight.

“You hear a lot of stories about ultra-religious people who can get very aggressive when it comes to these things,” Knan added, referring to protests such as those against Women of the Wall, a group campaigning for the rights of women praying at the Kotel. “Would they kick me out, call the police, throw stones, spit at me?”

Knowing the visit would be as much a political action as a religious pilgrimage, Knan decided to document it on video. But the anxiously awaited fight never came. “It was obvious people on the male side didn’t realize that I was a non-cis male, but that’s not the point,” Knan told me. “The achievement of the action was to raise awareness and open a discussion, which shouldn’t stop with: Can you pass as a woman or as a man?”

As Knan explains in the video: “I want to show that gender separation ‘by biology’ doesn’t make any sense.”

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Meet Sue-Ann Levy, Toronto's Gay, Right Wing Columnist

By Michael Kaminer for The Jewish Daily Forward

Sue-Ann Levy doesn’t sound like the devil, which a 2012 headline in a Toronto publication, The Grid, suggested she might be.

In fact, the woman who picked up the phone to chat with the Forward’s Michael Kaminer has a sweet, chirpy voice and an endearingly cheery manner. But these qualities belie the Toronto Sun investigative columnist’s steel spine. An out lesbian and relentless advocate for Israel, Levy’s also a dogged reporter whose scoops on municipal corruption and cronyism have made her both an idol and a punching bag.

Detractors have pounced on her more outrageous actions, like her 2012 tweet implying Barack Obama may be Muslim. Enemies have called her “an Internet troll, but in real life.” But those jabs just seem to stoke her. “Either you love me or you hate me,” she told the Forward from the home she shares with her wife, interior designer Denise Alexander, and dachshunds Kishka and Flora.

Michael Kaminer: That headline was severe. What is it about you that provokes such strong reactions?

Sue-Anny Levy: What provokes strong reactions is that I say it how I see it. There’s no BS about me. I’m outspoken, and I don’t fit into any molds. I’m right of center politically, fiscally conservative, socially aware, and openly gay. I’m not afraid to tackle the status quo. I love exposing waste and corruption. And I always do my homework. They can never tackle me on my facts. My scorn has been heaped on what I call the intolerant lib left here in Toronto, who say one thing and do another. Few people in my profession have the guts to do it.

You’ve just completed an autobiography set for release by Random House in 2015. Can you give us a sneak peek?

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Jewish groups praise Obama on LGBT worker rights expansion

Executive order adds transgender employees to those deserving protections

By JTA

WASHINGTON — A number of Jewish groups praised President Obama for extending federal job protections for gay employees to employees of government contractors.

Obama signed two executive orders, one extending existing job protections for federal employees who are gay to employees of federal contractors, and another adding transgender employees to those deserving protections.

Praising the move this week were Bend the Arc, a social action group; the Anti-Defamation League; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Religious Actions Center of the Reform movement. The orders were signed on July 18.

“The immediate impact of this executive order is that the many LGBT Americans who are part of the vast workforce of federal contractors no longer have to fear that they might be fired from their job because of who they are,” Stosh Cotler, Bend the Arc’s CEO, said in a statement.

“There are still millions of LGBT Americans working in private industry with no protection from discrimination.”

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The trials and triumph of an Orthodox Jewish transgender child

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

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen for Haaretz
NEW YORK – 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.

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Gay in Israel 2014: It’s a family affair

Surrogacy increasingly an option for gay singles and couples looking to have children.

By Danna Harman for Haaretz

Growing up in Haifa, people basically specialized in becoming parents,” says Guy Tatsa-Laur 44, who runs one of the more than a dozen surrogacy consulting agencies in Israel. “We all had the same banal fantasies of family life.”

When he realized he was gay, continues Tatsa-Laur, the first reaction he got at home was typically Israeli: “What? No grandchildren?”

“Twenty years ago, coming out and being true to yourself basically meant giving up on family,” he says.

But that was then. Today, same-sex couples (and gay singles) in Israel are as much about having children as their heterosexual next-door neighbors. And while this is increasingly true in Western countries, Israel, with its mix of family orientated character and generally liberal attitude toward homosexuality, makes for a special case.

For example, the theme of this year’s gay pride week in Tel Aviv is “families.” And, as a nod to that theme, the main parade will end not at the beach – where in past years participants have stripped down to basics and partied into the night – but at a nearby park, where gay families can join in the fun and play on the seesaws and kiddie swings.

“Sometimes, when I speak in European capitals to gay groups about surrogacy and creating families, there are those who raise an eyebrow as to why this is so important. Europeans just don’t have the same peer pressure as we do in Israel to become parents,” says Tatsa-Laur.

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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.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen for Haaretz


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.

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How Many Gay Haredim Are Married to Women?

By Emily L. Hauser for The Jewish Daily Forward

What do you do if you’re ultra-Orthodox and gay? You almost certainly hide.

On Thursday, Israeli daily Yediot reported new figures released by religious-gay support group Hod indicating that “two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox homosexuals [in Israel] have chosen to marry women despite their sexual inclination”; almost all of the more than 1,100 men included in Hod’s report admitted to having sex with other men at least once a month.

According to Hod founder Ron Yosef, an Orthodox rabbi and gay activist:

The situation of homosexuals in the Haredi society is much more difficult because of the social isolation they live in. A gay Haredi man cannot share his situation with his friends in the community or the yeshiva, his family members or rabbis, and “coming out of the closet” is definitely inconceivable.

It should be noted that Hod’s statistics are based on information received from gay ultra-Orthodox men who turned to the organization for help — which is to say: They reflect a self-selecting population, men who have heard of the group and reached a level of stress, or degree of openness, that would allow them to reach out. It’s hard to know how much the two-thirds figure actually tells us about the lived reality of gay Haredi men, but then, that’s a community about which it would be particularly hard to produce solid polling results.

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