A new, 16-month grant from the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York (UJA-Federation) seeks to provide support to a minority population today facing threats on all sides: Orthodox Jews who are LGBTQ.
The “generous” grant to Eshel, a nonprofit dedicated to pushing for greater acceptance of queer people in Orthodox communities, will be used to “rebuild connections to Judaism in supportive communal spaces for those who often feel alienated after coming out — and especially since the trauma of October 7,” Eshel said in announcing the grant.
Queer Orthodox Jews face many of the same forms of discrimination that other LGBTQ people experience in conservative religious spaces. When Rabbi Steven Greenberg came out in 1999, according to a 2023 Forward piece, a rabbinic authority quipped that seeking to be a gay Orthodox rabbi was like proclaiming that “I’m an Orthodox rabbi and I eat on Yom Kippur ham sandwiches.” Greenberg cofounded Eshel in 2010 with Miryam Kabakov, who currently serves as the organization’s executive director.
“This particular grant from the UJA has met the moment for us in that it’s going to help us increase community-building,” Kabakov said. “We’re watching the funding being cut for one vulnerable population after the other and we’re experiencing the trifecta in our corner of the Orthodox LGBTQ world, where Orthodox Jews and their families are facing a triple threat: loss of resources, exclusion from religious spaces and antisemitism in LGBTQ spaces, and this is creating an urgent moment for us.”
In addition to discrimination from religious peers, LGBTQ Orthodox Jews may also feel the weight of a federal administration with ties to virulent antisemites, the administration’s documented hostility to LGBTQ people as a whole, and, on top of that, current and planned cuts to federal mental health funding. And that’s in addition to the country’s current upsurge in antisemitism.
Those challenges would be more than enough for anyone, but they aren’t the only ones faced by the country’s queer Orthodox Jews: Queer spaces were becoming increasingly unwelcoming to pro-Israel Jews or those wearing or carrying the Star of David long before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and consequent war in Gaza. In 2017, for example, Jewish lesbians were excluded from Chicago’s Dyke March for carrying Jewish Pride flags bearing the Star of David.
Since 2023, though, the tensions have become worse. In addition to discrimination from their co-religionists, Orthodox LGBTQ people, who often wear symbols of their faith or religious garments, face the brunt of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, whether or not they support the Israeli government’s war on Gaza. A recent survey conducted by Eshel found that 67% of LGBTQ+ Jews who wear visible Jewish symbols reported experiencing antisemitism within the past year. In online spaces, 82% said that they were “blocked, harassed or otherwise made to feel unwelcome in queer online communities,” according to Eshel. The result is a painful disruption, with 43% of respondents turning to Jewish spaces for support and 38% seeking out Jewish-focused online communities.
“What we were finding is that Jews in LGBTQ spaces started to feel shunned and attacked and threatened, in particular Orthodox Jews, who tend to not be anti-Zionist from the get-go,” Kabakov told Inside Philanthropy.
But, Kabakov added, LGBTQ Jews “cannot fully participate at the moment in Orthodox spaces” because of religion-based discrimination. “We’ve been really successful” in creating more acceptance of queer people within the Orthodox community,” she said, but “we have a long way to go.”
‘A funding black hole’
Today, Eshel enjoys support from the Aviv Foundation, Micah Philanthropies and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies in addition to its most recent grant from the UJA Federation. When Kabakov and Rabbi Greenberg first launched the nonprofit, though, Kabakov told Inside Philanthropy that the new organization found itself in “a funding black hole.”
“No Orthodox place would fund us because we’re LGBT,” she said, “and 15 years ago, that was unheard of. No general Jewish foundation would fund us because they didn’t really understand why we would want to remain Orthodox and LGBTQ foundations were not funding us for the same reason: Why remain in a community that’s rejecting you?”
Kabakov likened the situation with those first potential funders as feeling like a zebra being asked to lose its stripes. “We don’t feel like we want to have to choose between our queerness and our Orthodoxy,” she said, “and we need to celebrate who we are.”
Eshel’s first philanthropic grant came from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, which funds efforts to support LGBTQ inclusion in faith communities across the spectrum. The foundation continues to support Eshel’s work, which today includes support groups in several locations in the U.S. and Canada, retreats, national phone-in groups, and resources for shuls, Orthodox allies and the parents of queer Orthodox Jews.
There are assuredly other, lesser-known groups of marginalized people with seemingly conflicting identities who share the problem of being unwelcome in one or more of the communities they identify with. Rather than overlooking such groups, funders may want to consider how to be more fully supportive of people in all of their complexity.
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