A Small Yet Monumental Summit on LGBT Issues Occurred at a Religious Kibbutz This Week
One of Israel’s most influential, religious Zionist groups invited a religious LGBTQ activist organizations to address tolerance and inclusion together
By Rachel Delia Benaim
December 2, 2016 • 3:23 PM
Israel’s religious Kibbutz movement, HaKibbutz Hadati, hosted a national summit on November 30 about the intersection of Orthodoxy and LGBTQ identity, in which leaders of the movement publicly engaged with a religious LGBTQ activist group. The event was a first for the movement, one of the most influential, religious Zionist groups in the country which has 10,000 members and serves as an umbrella organization for religious kibbutzim around the country.
About 75 people attended Monday’s conference at Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak in central Israel, which included a series of speeches given, including one by Meir Nehorai, a prominent rabbi who chairs the Beit Hillel group of Orthodox rabbis. Each orator addressed tolerance and inclusivity surrounding LGBTQ issues within the religious community, which fell in line with the inclusivity principles delineated by Beit Hillel in August, “on how to contain people with a homosexual orientation within faith communities.” The day would culminate with an open conversation with two members of Shoval, a religious LGBTQ activist group based out of Jerusalem.
This event comes on the heels of controversial comments made last week by Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, in which he called the LGBTQ community a “cult of abomination.” Amar came under fire from LGBTQ and human rights groups, but there were no tangible results to the protests. Though Israel prides itself for being the only LGBTQ friendly country in the Middle East, for those living outside of the Tel Aviv area, it has been an uphill battle for rights and recognition, especially in more religious areas.
This summit, then, was a step in a different direction that itself has some momentum. On Thursday night, the gay rights activist group Havruta along with South Jerusalem’s Ramban Synagogue, led by Rabbi Benny Lau, the nephew of a former Israeli chief rabbi (and cousin of a current one), organized an evening of conversation between Rabbanit Malka Pioterkovsky and families of religious LGBTQ people about religious families of people who have come out. The event was hosted in the synagogue.
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