Gay Pride
צילום: איי אף פי
Pink, white and blue
Despite flare of tension surrounding approaching Jerusalem Pride Parade, gay Jews will, in all likelihood, continue to make aliya in effort to realize age-old Jewish dream
"For whom should I wait late at night / When the city is sound a sleep / While I'm sitting at the temple's wall? For God, or for the Moroccan lad?"
Jacob Israel de Haan, known by many as Poet of The Jewish Song, was one of the most enigmatic, complex, and contradictory figures in the history of the State of Israel. A gay Orthodox Jewish poet who had published sadomasochistic and homosexual novels in Holland, de Haan immigrated to Palestine in 1919 to fight for the Zionist cause.
While he was adored by the Arab press as a great Arabophile, he also served as legal defense for Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Jewish nationalist, when he was tried for his resistance against the British occupation. And after just a few years after his arrival in Palestine on a cold January day, he aligned himself with the ultra-religious, anti-Zionist group led by Rabbi Sonnenfeld and was shortly thereafter murdered, constituting what is considered to be the first political assassination in Palestine.
Jerusalem Gay Parade (PR Photo)
De Haan’s life expresses the braid of politics, religion, and culture which has always found a tie in the issue of sexuality and, specifically, homosexuality. Today, the braid has further tightened and twisted with players from all of Israel’s religions coming from all parts of the world to engage in the battle that is now centered on the upcoming international Gay Pride Parade scheduled to take place in Jerusalem in August.
Zionist pink dream
But through all of the controversy and struggle, gay Jews from throughout the world continue to make aliya and to live, work, and study in Israel as a furtherance of the Zionist dream. Life as a gay Jew in Israel is of course not without its complications but as EJ, a gay Jew from New York who asked not to be identified, remarked, “It is surprising how many gay people there are who’ve made aliya.”
Though given the atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance in Tel Aviv where, EJ notes, gays and lesbians can frequently be seen holding hands in public without attracting undue attention, the situation is not so strange.
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New immigrants arriving in Israel (photo: Eli Elgarat)
"The community here is much smaller than New York and London,” he explains. “But I think the people here are much less pretentious and they're also very friendly - they love travelers and tourists. They're much more outgoing whereas in New York they're more 'whatever'."
EJ came to Israel as a new immigrant in the beginning of 2005. Being gay did not weigh heavily on his decision to emigrate from New York where he had a growing career and a comfortable life. It was, he explains, his Zionist aspirations that brought him to Israel and, so far, have kept him here.
“By being here I feel like I am contributing to the Jewish people in Israel directly. Because I don't have kids and I don't know if I will ever have kids, I feel that at least I'm adding something, while I'm alive, to Israel in some way that I couldn't do otherwise."
Holy-land, not Homo-land
However, not everyone agrees with this position. The prominent Brooklyn-based Rabbi Levin who is presently in Israel to help spearhead the struggle against the staging of the international Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem maintains: “Ill advised for those of the homosexual inclination or heightened libido heterosexuals who want to come to Israel. The God of the Jews abhors sexual promiscuity, immorality, licentiousness, et cetera.”
Levin, during a phone interview in which he came across as energetic, charismatic, and extremely busy (he had to answer his call waiting on his cell phone five or six times) is not one to mince words about his opinion of gays, specifically, and immorality in general. Israel, he believes, is a “spiritual isolation chamber which has a higher standard of acceptable behavior.”
When asked if it Israel should make a concerted effort to bring Jews from all over the world, regardless of their moral aptitude, in order to obey the Biblical injunction to gather the world’s Jewry in the Holy Land, he responded by saying, “Absolutely not. Theoretically, if homosexuals had come here with a low key, with a low voice, I could see how they wouldn’t be hurting anybody."
"People like that carry spiritual and political germs into the isolation bubble - in the Holy Land. This is the Holy Land,” he adds for emphasis, “not the Homo Land.”
They came. Then what?
Despite this sentiment, a number of groups are making efforts to bring Jews to Israel regardless of their sexual orientation and, in some cases, specifically on account of their sexuality. The Jewish Agency, as spokesman Michael Jankelowitz explained, does not discriminate on the basis of any personal feature of a potential oleh.
"It's none of our business what the sexual orientation of a person is,” he says. “We encourage aliya amongst those who are eligible, in general, under the Law of the Right of Return and there is no affirmative action for any group."
Fair enough. But what about the gay immigrants who are already living in Israel in communities less tolerant than the English-speaking or Western European communities? On this issue, the Ministry of Absorption, under Ze’ev Boim, did not respond to questions sent via email to the ministry’s spokeswoman.
But Shaul Gannon, a 12 year volunteer and former general manager of the Aguda, Israel’s only national gay advocacy group, says that in general the Ministry of Absorption turns to NGOs to address the needs of specific of special populations.
The Russian and Ethiopian gay populations in Israel, he explains, are two extremely at-risk groups who face an uphill struggle not only with regard to their absorption into a new country but also in the face of virulent hostility towards gays from the Russian and Ethiopian traditions.
Professional aid
The Aguda offers professional services such as psychological counseling and social but, Gannon recounts, “It took us some time to understand that the word ‘psychology’ in Russian is equivalent to psychiatry, and psychiatry was used as a weapon against people who had a free will or free mind to send them to the gulag.
"The Soviet government would establish that you are crazy because of your ideas or your sexual identity and you were sent to a faraway place. So every time we would offer the Russians professional help they would jump back like we were setting them on fire."
Gays within the Ethiopian community in Israel present a situation more difficult than even that of the Russians. "We have no group, we have no connection with them,” he says. “We know that they exist, but they don't come to us - neither young nor old. We also know that the cases of HIV are highest among the Ethiopian population."
It's not black-and-pink situation
But despite the mountainous challenges confronted by the Aguda, which was founded by 12 Anglo immigrants in 1975, there is much to be positive about, according to Gannon. Israel, for instance, has one of the few armies where gays and transgender people can serve openly and it is possibly the only army in the world in which people with HIV can serve if they wish to. Even Gannon, an expert on the politics of homosexuality in Israel, admits he is at a loss to explain phenomena like these.
Explaining much of the dynamic swirling around the issue of homosexuality is a near-impossible task. However, despite the flare of tension surrounding the approaching Pride Parade, gay Jews will, in all likelihood, continue to make aliya in an effort to realize an age-old Jewish dream.
But the many forces of this issue, which makes friends out of enemies and enemies out of friends, will have to be negotiated to find the kind of balance that is represented by the very existence of the State of Israel.
In Rabbi Levin’s opinion “The whole message is self control.”
In EJ’s opinion, which focuses around tolerance and the relinquishing of what he considers to be an ancient prejudice, the state of gay relations in Israel is best summed up by a comparison with his native country.
“Everyone knows the Bush Administration is not big on gays, but you would never hear anyone in the Administration say what (Minister of Industry, Trade, and Commerce) Eli Yishai said, that we're diseased, mentally ill, immoral and corrupt and that we should be fed hormones to make us normal. How a minister in government in a country with anti-incitement laws can get away with saying something like that is amazing. It's not right.”
But whatever the opinions might be, and however they may clash, participants in the conflict surrounding gay aliya and gay relations in Israel would be well served by the story of Jacob Israel de Haan which teaches us that when the parties in conflict cannot strike a balance, the risk is run of losing someone loved by everyone.
Gene Epstein contributed to this story
