Art Of Gay Religious Jews Bridges Worlds

by Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent

Jerusalem —  Nine years ago, Sandi DuBowski’s documentary film “Trembling Before G-d” first illuminated the struggle of gays and lesbians in the Orthodox Jewish world as they navigated the tension between their faith and their sexual orientation.
That exploration is being expanded on this week, though in a different medium. “Out of the Sacred Closet: Beauty, Belief, Identity” is a joint exhibition at the Hadassah Art Gallery in the German Colony here of 14 gay and lesbian artists from the Orthodox world whose creativity is driven by an effort to somehow reconcile the seeming clash in their identities.

Themes of social isolation, conflict, marriage and sexual repression dominate the works. But perhaps in some unconscious deference to the communities in which they grew up,

the artists do not use graphic sexual images to make their statement.

In one photograph, two men draped in prayer shawls brush fingers with one another, almost surreptitiously. A series of images shows a young woman dressed in the clothing of a man from a shtetl in three different settings.

A painting evoking Soviet-era iconic propaganda images popular with early Zionists shows two men — one with a yarmulke — with a baby. Above is the biblical commandment “be fruitful and multiply.”

“You have a gay problem here and you have Jewish identity,” said exhibition curator Ofra Zucker, referring to the dilemmas faced by gay couples who want to have families but their marriages are not recognized in the Orthodox community.

(In a bit of serendipity, this week for the first time Israel’s National Insurance Institute granted a gay man maternity leave. The man, Yonatan Gher, director of Jerusalem’s nonprofit Open House Pride and Tolerance organization, was granted the leave after his biological son was born of a surrogate mother in India. He and his partner have been together for seven years.)

“The idea of the exhibition is to search for the types of works that describe the complexity and the unique part of the gay Jewish religious artist,” Zucker continued.

Zucker, who oversees the Hadassah gallery, said that gay activist Danny Elbaz approached her with the idea of staging an exhibition. Elbaz helps run Hevruta, an organization affiliated with the Open House gay and lesbian center.

Elbaz said that some art experts initially thought the project was a gimmick and didn’t understand the vision. The idea behind the exhibit, he explained, is to raise the profile of Orthodox gays and lesbians within their home communities, and to reach out to gays and lesbians looking for support.

It may be working. 

Writing this week in the online journal Ma’arav, culture critics David Shepeber and Tzachi Mezuman said,

“Discussion of gender and sexual identity in the Modern Orthodox discourse in Israel is perhaps the most challenging, refreshing and subversive in contemporary Judaism. “This [the ‘Out of the Sacred Closet’ show] is a dramatic turnabout: a subject which was marginalized in the religious community has become overnight a legitimate issue,” they wrote.

The exhibition’s opening on Tuesday night drew some 250 people.

“We are unseen in the community,” said Elbaz of Jerusalem’s gays and lesbians. “Maybe this is what we want to say — that we are part of the community, and we pray in the same shuls.”

In a city where religious sensitivity toward the gay community is heightened and often unpredictable, staging such an exhibition risks stirring up controversy. Plans to hold an international gay parade in Jerusalem were delayed after the haredi community whipped up a tide of anger that eventually became the subject of a national debate over the extent of freedom of speech in Jerusalem.

So far, however, the exhibition organizers said they are unaware of a huge outcry, save for the talk-back responses to an article on exhibition that appeared on the Israeli Web site Ynet.com.

“A disgrace for the Torah. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Stay in your closet,” wrote Ehud from Beit Shemesh.

Another response to the article described the idea as “disgusting.” “Take your yarmulkes off and be what you really are. You can’t just accept what is convenient in the bible. When you decide to take, you must take it all, not just pieces.”
Though the gay community in Jerusalem has been organized through the Open House, which opened 12 years ago, only in the last year and a half have two Orthodox gay groups started to assert their presence in the religious community.

In a letter to leading rabbis, community leaders and politicians in the religious community, the group “Hod” — a Hebrew acronym for “homosexual and religious” — insisted that “homosexuals must be in the community together with all of the people of Israel.”

As a result of the letter, the religious gay community has held two meetings with prominent rabbis from Israel’s national religious world, including Rabbi Yuval Sherlow, who heads the Hesder Yeshiva in Petach Tikvah, and Rabbi Yaakov Meidan, a leader of the Har Etzion Yeshiva in the settlement of Alon Shvut. 

Rabbi Sherlow encouraged community members to come out of the closet.

Both leaders were criticized for even meeting with the gay community. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, another influential figure, wrote an opinion article on ynet.com giving advice to Orthodox gays on counseling to help them change their sexual orientation.         

Dror Zakaria, a member of “Hod,” said the works he contributed to the exhibition were originally a project while studying graphic design at an ORT technical school.

Describing himself as “religious as they come,” Zakaria explained that his photography helped him come out to his college school class. In one of his photographs in the show, a man covered in a tallit prayer shawl — accented with a stripe of rainbow, the universal symbol of gay rights — raises his hands skyward while looking out to a vast ocean.

“It’s to show a prayer to God, a shout to the heavens,” Zakaria said. “The tallit shows a person who is religious and the colors are bold. The person feels small and it is difficult for him,” he said.
“It would be very easy to go and live in Tel Aviv,” Zakaria said. “It’s harder to live in Jerusalem in front of our rabbis.”

Another artist in the show, Dina Berman, is a graduate of Bezalel art school and now lives with a life partner in Jerusalem. Berman’s installation of an old payphone stuffed with wedding bands is meant as a reference to the institution of marriage.

“There’s a desperate need to get married,” Berman, who is a member of Bat Kol, a group of lesbian religious women. “There’s so much social pressure. To get married, a person will do anything, like putting a personal add as a flyer.”

Though Berman’s parents know about her sexual orientation, she’s concerned about how it will be received in her hometown in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Berman, who works as a nanny and art teacher, said, “I don’t want to leave the community. I consider myself religious, not Reform nor Conservative. … This is my way of saying I want to take part.”