On Sunday, when the members of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) march from their Bethune Street home to their new quarters at 130 West 30th Street, they’ll be hauling a lot of history. There’s the rainbow-colored chuppah that Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum used to celebrate the first same-sex Jewish weddings in front of City Hall on June 24, 2011. There’s an upholstered chair, bequeathed by a member who, in the last months before he died of AIDS in 1992, found the old metal folding chairs a torment. There are the candles carried in a shopping bag, just as they were on the Friday evening in 1973, when a dozen people answered a tiny ad in the Village Voice (“Gay Synagogue,” it announced) and gathered in a church annex.
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