Poland’s gay rabbi
Poland has its first openly gay rabbi, reports The Associated Press:
WARSAW, Poland — When Rabbi Aaron Katz walks the streets of Warsaw's former Jewish quarter, scenes of that lost world fill his imagination: Families headed to synagogue, women in their kitchens cooking Sabbath meals, his father as a boy with the sidecurls of an Orthodox Jew.
But Katz's life could hardly be more different from that prewar eastern European culture, at least in one key respect: He is Poland's first openly gay rabbi.
Born in Argentina 53 years ago to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust, Katz is the latest rabbi to play his part in reviving a once vibrant Jewish community that was all but wiped out by Hitler.
He settled into Warsaw's historic Jewish district in March with Kevin Gleason, a former Hollywood producer on such reality TV shows as "The Bachelor" and "Nanny 911," with whom he entered into a registered domestic partnership in Los Angeles two years ago.
They live only three streets from the birth home of Katz's father in a modern and spacious apartment with their dogs, two gentle brown boxers. Katz says he is moved by the links to his past, but keeps his focus on the future.
"I don't think we will come back to this great Jewish life," he said, referring to prewar Poland, a country where one person in 10 was Jewish and where synagogues, yeshivas and shtetls defined the landscape. "But I hope we will have a normal Jewish life in Poland."
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I never realized there was so much hatred among Jews until I started reading this board. Many of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Even a gay rabbi deserves a little happiness. And in case you didn’t know, the actor who played Motel the tailor in “Fiddler on the Roof”, Leonard Frey, was also gay.
The “rabbi” has made it everybody’s business by “outing” himself and professing to be a Jewish religious leader. Katz has further exposed his confusion by his chutzpah to speak of hoping for “a normal Jewish life in Poland.” The sinful practice of homosexuality is not normal among truly Torah-observant Jews or Christians and remains an abomination, as I dare to share within God and the Gays.
Wow - I didn’t realize you were THAT David Ben-Ariel...wow…
Clearly you’re wholly against homosexuality, as evidence from this headline from your website:-
“David Ben-Ariel warns about a German-led Europe that God will permit to nuke the American, British and Jewish peoples for our national sins. Whether it’s Christmas, Easter, abortion or homosexual marriages, they’re all to blame and abominable”
http://beyondbabylon.blogspot.com/2009/05/im-not-terrorist.html
Well, as a Christian Zionist you also have countless reasons to believe in tolerance and democracy. If you are against homosexuality, don’t do it. God ultimately decides the morality of a person’s actions, and I don’t think you can claim that because this Rabbi is openly gay, that that somehow makes it everybody else’s business.
It’s between him, his flock, and God.
What next? “Poland’s first pork eating Rabbi”, or “Poland’s first non-Sabbath-observant Rabbi”?
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t represent a religion and defy its doctrine at the same time. And clearly he is defying the doctrine..
Leviticus 20:13. If a man also lies with men, as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Deuteronomy 22:5. The woman shall not wear that which belongs to a man, neither shall a man put on a womans garment; for all who do so are abomination to the Lord your God.
Pete - do you believe that all Rabbis are infallible?
Even in Catholisism, it’s acknowledged that the Clergy aren’t infallible, and sin, in keeping with God’s creation.
I’m against this guy PRACTICING homosexuality, but if his congregation wish to treat homosexuality rather like you and I treat other sins, then that’s their theological decision, and it’s actually a wholly logical one, given that we are more than willing to go to Rabbis in the knowledge that they too sin.
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Judy Pollock
06/26/09 07:07 PM
Homosexuality is sin, and it is a disgrace that this ‘rabbi’ is living the perverse lifestyle that his Orthodox father would be extremely ashamed of.