Among the throngs coming from around the world to partake in Jerusalem’s World Pride event in August will be a large contingent from the Bay Area.
Like many gay and lesbian-identified synagogues around the country, San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav is planning a trip — though lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender members of other congregations are invited to join the group. And the Jewish Community Relations Council of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation is coordinating a trip for LGBT civic leaders, both Jewish and non-Jewish, together with the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.
United Jewish Communities, the national umbrella group for the federations, is planning its first-ever LGBT mission, which will end before the World Pride festivities begin. Participants can, however, elect to extend their stay for the World Pride festivities. Bonnie Feinberg, director of the LGBT Alliance of the S.F.-based JCF, is working toward getting a Bay Area group to join that mission.
The World Pride festival includes interfaith seminars and workshops. It is sponsored in Israel by the Jerusalem Open House, an organization that welcomes Jewish, Christian and Muslim gay men and lesbians. Jerusalem has hosted gay pride parades for three years, but this is the first to be sponsored by an international organization, Interpride.
Rabbi Camille Shira Angel, spiritual leader of Sha’ar Zahav, is co-leading her synagogue’s mission with an Israeli lesbian tour guide. Calling the trip “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Angel said this kind of pilgrimage was a wonderful way for LGBT Jews to integrate the various aspects of their identities. A maximum of 40 people will be able to go.
Angel couldn’t yet offer too many specifics, but said, “Any time you take a congregational trip, it’s special because it deepens relationships within your community.”
An informational meeting about the mission will be held 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F.
The joint JCRC-Community Center mission will resemble previous JCRC missions for elected officials, which are funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund.
Since the majority of the 15 to 20 participants will be from the LGBT community, the mission will meet with LGBT leaders in Israel, as well as other politicians and policymakers.
While the trip’s exact itinerary is still being worked out, participants will be able to attend many of the World Pride events.
Feinberg said she hoped the UJC mission “will lead to increased involvement of LGBT people in the Jewish community and throughout the federation system.”
Organizers don’t know how many people to expect.
The UJC mission and the World Pride events in general have received some very negative reactions from religious leaders. Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition, a conservative political group headquartered in Washington state, reacted strongly.
“My first reaction was that it was deja vu,” Lapin said. “This was the Nazis marching in Skokie.”
He was talking about an incident in the late 1970s when the American Nazi Party marched through an Illinois city, upsetting the many Holocaust survivors who lived there and causing a firestorm of protest. “I’m not saying that the homosexuals are Nazis,” Lapin continued. “I am saying that there is such a thing as deliberate provocation.”
Many media outlets carried photographs from a recent news conference where high-ranking Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Muslim
clerics met to denounce plans for World Pride.
“The reaction of these leaders highlights the real need for World Pride, for the massive display of love, acceptance, diversity and pride in the holiest of holy cities that this event will be,” said Feinberg.
UJC mission information: Bonnie Feinberg at (415) 512-6229 or www.ujc.org. Sha’ar Zahav mission information: Gabby Volodarsky at (415) 861-6932 ext. 310 or www.shaarzahav.org.
Joanne Palmer of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributed to this report.
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