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.

Continue reading.


For more LGBT news, check out our    page.

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.” 

Continue reading.


For more LGBT news, check out our    page.

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

For more LGBT news, check out our    page.

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.”

Continue reading.


For more LGBT news, check out our    page.

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?

Continue reading.

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.

Continue reading.

For more LGBT news, check out our    page.

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.

Continue reading.

For more LGBT news, check out our    page.