Gay, Lesbian Synagogue Celebrates 25th Year

The Beth Chayim Chadashim synagogue, at Pico Boulevard and Stearns Drive, close to both the Fairfax district (the heart of Orthodox Jewish life in Los Angeles) and West Hollywood (the heart of L.A.’s gay community), is celebrating its 25th year serving the gay and lesbian Jewish community.

Beth Chayim has 250 members, not including children, and it is rapidly outgrowing the cozy headquarters that once housed a dance studio. High Holy Days services must now be held at Temple Isaiah down the street. Beth Chayim’s oldest member is 87, and about 90% of the congregation is gay or lesbian (a reversal of the general population in the United States, where some estimates suggest that 10% of the population is gay or lesbian).

This year, the synagogue hopes to raise $150,000 for building, remodeling, programming, paying a canonical soloist and starting a school. Many of Beth Chayim’s original members now have extended families of their own, and their children are ready for religious training. Once a month, the congregation holds Shabbat services for the elderly at a nearby nursing home. Beth Chayim also led the movement in Los Angeles to support Jews with AIDS, as the first synagogue to offer services for those with the disease and to send members into the community to visit AIDS patients.

At a time when many mainstream churches are still struggling with the question of how to deal with gay members, several congregations in Los Angeles, like Beth Chayim, are getting ready for the next generation, expanding their outreach and services to gays and lesbians. By comparison, for example, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ administrative board in September released “Always Our Children,” which urged parents to love and accept their homosexual children--a document that took five years to draft.

“The people who come here are looking for a community,” said Rabbi Lisa Edwards of Beth Chayim’s growing congregation. Soft-spoken and straightforward, Edwards was installed as the synagogue’s rabbi in November 1994.

“Many members of our congregation are at a point of great change in their lives,” Edwards said. “Many come here after a painful break with tradition, but none of them are here because they feel they should be here, unlike some other congregations. They want to be here.”

Edwards came to rabbinical study in midlife and through literature. She finished her undergraduate education at Brown University in Rhode Island, went on to get a master’s degree in English at the University of Chicago and then wrote a dissertation at the University of Iowa on post-Holocaust Jewish American fiction.

In 1988, at 36, she came to Hebrew Union College, a Reform seminary in Los Angeles. That was the year before the college announced a policy acknowledging the rights of gays and lesbians to study to become rabbis. After rabbinical school, Edwards was an intern at Beth Chayim for three years before becoming its rabbi.

Beth Chayim Chadashim, which means House of New Life, was founded specifically to serve the gay and lesbian community, and Edwards said hers is the oldest gay synagogue in the nation.

“Beth Chayim has been a growing force in the Los Angeles Jewish community in the last quarter-century,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Community. “It serves an important segment of the Jewish community and has been a moral force at times, instructing the rest of us in the Jewish rabbinate on how we need to apply our positive values more broadly.”

In 1987, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations adopted a resolution supporting gay and lesbian inclusion in Los Angeles congregations. In 1989, the Reform movement announced support for education and outreach to welcome gay couples into congregations.

In 1994, Los Angeles Rabbi Laura Geller became the first female head of a major urban Jewish congregation (then 900 families). Geller was then the third woman ordained as a rabbi in the liberal Reform movement, which claims the allegiance of 40% of synagogue-affiliated Jews in the United States. In 1997, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical leadership of Reform Judaism, resolved to support civil marriages for gays and lesbians.

Synagogues are not the only congregations reaching out. The predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, which has been conducting “holy union” ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples for 25 years, has several congregations in the Los Angeles area. Hollywood United Methodist Church has a program to bring in homosexuals. In 1974, the pastor of a Lutheran church in North Hollywood who supports gay rights became a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1995 started the first support group in the country for Spanish-speaking gays and lesbians.

There is little time to cling to tradition in this trend-setting city, a living stage for experiments in institutional change that sometimes fail and sometimes become the example for the rest of the country. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. George L. Carey, visited Los Angeles in 1996, he urged its congregations to take up the question of homosexuals ordained in churches and same-sex marriages slowly.

By that time, several churches and synagogues in Los Angeles were already in their second decade of commitment to their gay and lesbian congregations.

Edwards described the many changes she has seen as a kind of unfolding, acknowledging the hard work and willpower behind the changes of the last few decades.

“People everywhere are moving toward a more spiritual search,” she said. “The Jewish community has been, for many people, too often a business network. This is a city where gay and lesbian people live. Jewishness here has to be open to diversity.”

Edwards said she is thrilled by the creativity of her work, designing new rituals to meet the needs of gays and lesbians, and by watching a new generation of children whose parents are gay or lesbian come to services. Many of them are adopted from China, Siberia and other parts of the world, and this promises an ethnic diversity that Edwards said she is looking forward to.