Same-sex Marriage Has Legal Obligations

A Wider Bridge's Staff

Frederick Hertz, a leading attorney for marriage and divorce law and mediation for same-sex couples, and the author of three books on these issues, returns to Israel this June to speak at 40 Years of Pride: the first ever Global LGBT Leadership Conference in Tel Aviv.

Earlier this year, Frederick Hertz invited US gay family lawyers to come to Israel and learn about the legal and policy issues for gay couples in Israel. The trip took place in February 2015, with fourteen lawyers joining Fred for a week-long visit “It was a fabulous program,” he recalls. “It turned out that the American lawyers learned a lot from the way the LGBT community navigates through law in Israel: that you can extend rights to gay couples even without legalizing marriage.”

“The lack of civil marriage in Israel has led to the creation of an ‘alternative’ approach, via cohabitation rights, that is quite effective,” Hertz explains. “Most of the lawyers in my program had been convinced that the solution had to be via the ending of religious marriage and the enactment of civil marriage. Learning how things are finessed in Israel was a real eye opener to my group. Another aspect was seeing how the issue of Jewish law still dominates family law in Israel, despite it being a ‘modern’ society.”

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An Open Letter to Tom and Transgender Teens Everywhere

By Rabbi Becky Silverstein for MyJewishLearning.com

Last week the story of Tom Chai Sosnik, a teenager that came out as transgender at Tehiyah Day School, his Jewish day school, headlines. Inspired by Tom’s courage, and the need to support transgender and gender expansive teenagers everywhere, Rabbi Becky Silverstein penned an open letter to Tom and teenagers like him. We’re proud to share this letter on Transgender Day of Visibility.

Dear Tom,

As I was preparing my sermon last Friday afternoon, I decided to take a quick Facebook break and saw the video of you addressing your school. I watched it and immediately shared it with my own social network, commenting that “while I don’t know this young man, I have the privilege of knowing others who share a similar story. Almost nothing in the world could make me smile wider than this.”

Tom, we have never and may never meet, and yet I feel as though I know you.

I see in your face the faces of the LGBTQ Jewish teenagers I have had the opportunity to work with in my time as a Jewish educator and rabbi. In your face, I also see a vision of what I want so badly for our Jewish community to be: a place where everyone can be celebrated for the entirety of who they are and where nobody feels the need to hide a piece of their identity.

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LGBTQ Orthodox Teens, Forging a Derech

Justin Spiro, Special To The Jewish Week
 “Do you have any resources for a 15-year-old gay yeshiva high school student?”

It was 2011, and I could hardly believe my ears. I apologized to this desperate mother and offered the small consolation that her son can attend the JQY adult meetings when he graduates high school. (JQY is the largest national non-profit supporting LGBTQ youth and their families in the Orthodox community.) As I hung up the phone, I didn’t feel very good, so I could only imagine how she and her son felt. This was just months after a string of high-profile LGBTQ teen suicides, and the It Gets Better Project had been launched to give LGBTQ youth a message of hope for the future. JQY even created its own "It Gets Better" video for Orthodox gay youth. While the project was well-intentioned, the It Gets Better message tells a drowning child that a raft is coming. Some teens simply cannot stay afloat. It was time to build more rafts.

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Out, Proud, and Kinda Loud at Yeshiva University

Students are challenging the Modern Orthodox school’s traditional stance on LGBT issues

By Daniela Alexandra Porat for Tablet Magazine

Dasha Sominski rushed into the Shabbat service reeking of smoke and perfume, her curly blue bangs covering her right eye. She had skipped all the prayers and rituals.

It was a Friday night last fall in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Sominski, 21, had been chosen by Eshel, an LGBT Orthodox Jewish organization based in New York City, to speak to a room full of observant Orthodox Jews about what it’s like to be openly queer at Yeshiva University, the flagship Modern Orthodox school.

The attendees had gathered in a makeshift prayer room to kick off a Shabbaton, a Friday-night and Saturday program of activities and services organized by Eshel and aimed at affirming the possibility of living a devout Jewish life while identifying as queer. The small group of attendees was a mix of older individuals, some of whom were from out of town, a few Y.U. alums, and several young professionals. At one point during the service, a young male congregant had delivered a homily about “Lekha Dodi,” the liturgical song in which the Sabbath is personified as a bride. He spoke of the need to reinterpret this song because several people in attendance would not be privy to such a holy union—between God and his bride, between man and woman.

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Queer Jewish Women Need to Create Their Own Spaces

By A.J. Campbell, The Jewish Daily Forward

In a recent piece on The Sisterhood, J.E. Reich writes that there is a lack of safe spaces for queer Jewish women particularly in New York City. She attributes this to silence of the mainstream community to create space for us. I disagree with the idea that we need Jewish organizations to open the door to us.

We need to open our own doors.

Reich makes the point that the mainstream Jewish organization are in need of better tools and resources for LGBTQ inclusion. I don’t believe that change will happen even with the best toolbox. If you want to feel included in an organization, you have to join it. Queer Jewish women need to show up and keep showing up. We can’t wait for the doors to be opened, we have to go out and open them.

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Rachel Timoner succeeds Andy Bachman as rabbi at Brooklyn congregation

From The Times of Israel

Rachel Timoner, a married lesbian mother of two, was named senior rabbi of Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim.

Timoner, the assistant rabbi at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, will replace the eminent Rabbi Andy Bachman as head of the Reform synagogue, the daily Forward reported. She was the unanimous choice of the search committee, according to the Forward. Her appointment must be approved at a special membership meeting.

Bachman, a perennial presence on “top rabbis” lists, announced last March that he would be stepping down to pursue helping the general community on broader issues such as poverty, hunger and homelessness. He has served Beth Elohim, a large congregation in the Park Slope neighborhood, since 2006; his contract runs out at the end of June.

Timoner, a Miami native, has won awards for community service and her work with LGBT youth. She was ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where she was a Wexner graduate fellow. She has a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.

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Reform rabbis gather in Philadelphia to appoint first openly gay president

From newsworks.org

The Central Conference of American Rabbis is the rabbinical arm of the Reform Judaism movement. On Sunday, Philadelphia will host its 126th annual convention, where Rabbi Denise Eger will become the organization's first openly gay president. A longtime leader in the LGBT community and an advocate for  human rights, she is one of the first openly gay leaders of any major religious organization.

At the convention CCAR also will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its resolution calling for the ordination of gay Reform rabbis, a landmark in its long history at the forefront of advancing LGBT and human rights that includes a 1977 resolution calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality and an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Additionally, the CCAR will release Mishkan HaNefesh, a new, more inclusive prayer book for the high holidays, as well as a new "rabbi's manual," which adopts new language that no longer differentiates or privileges straight weddings over gay weddings.

Eger talked about her aspirations for the Reform movement with WHYY's Kimberly Haas.

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