Last Sunday was the 16th annual Pride March in St Kilda. Melbourne’s weather started out a little rainy and overcast, but cleared in time for the parade, leaving an abundance of blue skies and sunshine.
Young Aleph in Pride March
Kaye Sera always brings a ray of sunshine, and a pink plastic penis.
Kaye Sera in Pride March
Behind-the-scenes magic was performed by Colin Krycer, back with a vengeance after missing the prior year’s parade due to an appointment with a heart surgeon.
Colin Krycer (L) offering a helping hand
Pride March celebrates the diversity and under the umbrella of the Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council marched a diverse array of cultural organisations.
Alyena and John from the AGMC
I’ve posted my photos from the day in Google Photos and Facebook. Enjoy them and feel free to comment.
Yes, it’s true. The JCCV, under the presidency of John Searle, want to work toward full acceptance of homosexuality in the Victorian Jewish community. It’s been reported in the Australian Jewish News (Melbourne edition,) on page 9 (Dec 3 2010).
Praise for the JCCV
AJN STAFF
UNDERSTANDING and cooperation between faiths is key to promoting a better society, according to commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission Helen Szoke.
Szoke made the comments as guest speaker at last week’s Jewish Community Council of Victoria’s (JCCV) 3rd annual general meeting.
She explained the work of the commission, the importance of building a human rights culture, and law reforms planned for the near future.
Szoke also noted the similarities between her organisation and the JCCV, praising Victoria’s peak Jewish body for its efforts to stamp out hate crimes.
Changes to the JCCV executive included Matthew Lazerow and Helen Light joining, and Gerard Max stepping down.
With one year of his term remaining, president John Searle said he felt it appropriate to reflect on the JCCV’s achievements to date, as well as looking ahead to the next 12 months.
“In so doing, it is important to remember that five or 10 years ago, the JCCV was cash-strapped, not particularly well known and lacking in influence.
“Today, it is truly an influential body, capable or representing our community at all levels and whose input is sought by government, police, the media and many other bodies.”
Searle spoke highly of the Youth and Alcohol Project and thanks project office Debbie Zauder for her efforts.
He also made mention of the GLBT reference group formed by the JCCV, which is continuing to work towards combating discrimination, vilification and managing mental health issues.
You see, the only way that discrimination and vilification against GLBT people in the Jewish community, along with managing mental health issues in same-sex attracted people who don’t necessarily identify with the GLBT community (ie, they haven’t accepted their sexual orientation and may still reluctantly identify as heterosexual) will come about is when the JCCV work toward full acceptance of homosexuality in the Jewish community. It’s a bit like being pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. There are no half measures in taking on these challenges.
Some more good news to share. It’s now been 12 months since the JCCV formed their GLBT reference group and they have had a number of great successes as a result of this. These include
making sure that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the Jewish community still don’t have a voice at the table in the community and effectively remain unrepresented by the JCCV
further alienating, excluding and isolating GLBT Jews
having nothing to show for all that has been done over the past 12 months
not speaking out against intolerance of homosexuality in the Jewish community
ignoring homophobic hate in the Jewish community
closing lines of communication with established GLBT networks in the Jewish community
not acknowledging that suicide amongst same-sex attracted youth is a major problem in Australia and is worst amongst religious communities intolerant of homosexuality
It really has been a great twelve months of success for the JCCV. Let’s toast a l’chaim to the next twelve.
PS. I’m still here waiting for you, when you’re ready to re-open the lines of communication John. My number is on the contact page here.
Almost twelve years ago, in 1999, Anton Block seconded the motion for the gay Jewish social and support group Aleph Melbourne to become an affiliate member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV).
Motion for affiliate membership status of Aleph Melbourne
As history dictated in May 1999, this motion, put a second time after the first was deemed void due to a technicality at the March plenum meeting, failed to pass and the application by Aleph Melbourne was rejected by the JCCV. No further application for membership by Aleph Melbourne has been made since and, particularly during the term that Block was president, no invitation to reapply for membership was extended by the JCCV.
Having since served a three-year term as President of the JCCV (2006-08), and now appointed to the position of Chairman of the JCCV’s Anti-Defamation Commission, there has been nothing but silence from Block on his one-time support for gay Jews.
But why did Block go silent on this matter? Is he fearful that if he openly supports visibility and inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people in the Jewish community he might face a backlash from the Orthodox sector of the Jewish community? He will only stand to gain support and adulation from the large Progressive, Conservative, secular and other sectors of the community that express their unconditional support for GLBT Jews.
I understand that Block is on the mysterious “GLBT Reference Group” that the JCCV formed in December 2009. However his inclusion in this group has not been made public, as the JCCV has refused to disclose its membership. If Block is on this reference group, as I believe he is, then he must speak up about it, and he must speak up as to why he sits on it. I hope it’s for a more altruistic reason than kudos.
I put it to Block that maintaining this silence is harming the entire community, along with his credibility. The alarming rate of suicide amongst same-sex attracted youth does not bypass Jews. It is imperative that Block takes an active and vocal stance on fighting all intolerance of and working toward unconditional acceptance, visibility and inclusion of GLBT people in the Jewish community. Only then will he show he is capable of being a genuine leader in his community.
For the past nine years United We Dance has been one of the highlights of Melbourne’s queer community’s calendar. Primarily established as a fund-raising event, bringing together people from different multicultural communities, the event has gone from strength to strength.
Organising an annual dance party with the best multicultural DJs and 15 excellent performances staged over the evening doesn’t just happen by itself. Many months of hard work happen behind the scene and accolades must be given to John Tzimas, Colin Krycer and their teams who have undertaken this mammoth effort annually.
I have been lucky enough to have been involved as the photographer for the event since 2004, when it formed the closing party for the Inaugural Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Conference in October that year.
It has been an honour being involved with United We Dance for all these years. I love the people who attend, in all their diversity. I love the organisers for putting on an excellent night’s entertainment, knowing that every cent raised is going directly to support the community. I love the buzz it gives me, being there and getting to meet and photograph everyone. I also love that it’s a place where people from every nationality, cultural background, religion (and absence of), gender identity and sexual orientation come together to enjoy a night out and treat each other as equal. It sets an example wider society can take a lesson from.
Please take a few moments to browse my galleries from this and previous years and enjoy a sense of the unity and harmony that United We Dance fosters. It’s truly unique.
Finally Searle said that ”the GLBT Reference group formed by JCCV, is continuing to work towards combatting discrimination, vilification and managing mental health issues for this community. The plan is to look at speaking with school representatives in regards to bullying issues.
and
Searle has pledged to host more politicians’ lunches, conduct more interfaith activities starting with the Croatian community and expects to welcome more new affiliates next year in keeping with the JCCV’s policy of inclusion.”
Combatting bullying in schools necessary, as we know from the It Gets Better Project, but we need to hear the JCCV say that any intolerance of homosexuality is unacceptable to know they are taking the issue seriously. To date that is the one thing they refuse to say.
For a secular organisation, with no official religious position, it is evident they are biased toward the interests of their Orthodox membership, and this is not the role of the organisation that is supposed to represent the entire Jewish community.
As for the “JCCV’s policy of inclusion”. That is deceitful. The JCCV has a strong history of excluding various organisations in the Jewish community, including the gay group Aleph Melbourne, and it certainly has excluded me from any discussions.
The JCCV needs a major overhaul, which I would suggest should start with the removal of the president. Only then might the organisation start to become representative.
The world needs more people like Rochelle Millar and Jonathan Keren-Black.
From time to time I find myself remembering Rochelle Millar. The world needs more Rochelles. The world also needs more Jonathans. They’re decent people. The world needs more decent people.
At the end of the Noah story, Noah plants vines, makes wine, and gets drunk. After all that he’d been through, you can hardly blame him! But in his drunken state, his usual sense of modesty and decency seems to have been set aside – something inappropriate happened. It is not at all clear what it was. It involved his son Ham, who may only have seen his father naked – whatever it was though, Ham was damned as a slave for all time.
In our own portion this week, Avram palms off his wife Sarai as his sister. She goes off to be one of Pharaoh’s wives. Clearly this is again an inappropriate, at least potentially sexual, relationship. And the bible abounds with such stories, such as Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, who he thought was a prostitute, or Potiphar’s wife trying to entice Joseph.
The bible returns time and again to the theme of appropriate and inappropriate sexual relationships. You probably heard the story of Moses returning to the Israelites – I’ve got good news and bad news, he says. The good news is I’ve got it down to ten – the bad news is number seven is still in! So we are reminded that the prohibition against adultery even made it into the ten commandments.
Just because something may have been considered inappropriate to our ancestors of three thousand and more years ago does not mean it is necessarily the same for us today. For example, they decreed that if a woman was raped in a town, she and the rapist should both be put to death. The rationale is that if she wanted to, she could have called for help. Never mind that the rapist could be threatening her with a sharp flint or knife, or that no-one else dared go out to help. The kind of argument that rightly causes a furore in the western media even today if someone suggests it.
Bear in mind that the goal of our ancestors was to build a big, strong nation – to produce as many children as possible, to successfully conquer the land of Canaan. The first commandment, given to the animals and then repeated to humans, was P’ru U’rvu – be fruitful and multiply.
If anyone felt attracted to their own sex, that was not considered normal or permissible. It would not produce new children, more soldiers. And so, right in the heart of Leviticus, we seem to have two strong prohibitions on homosexuality – one who lies with a man as with a woman should be put to death. When, at a later stage, the ancient rabbis considered the matter again, they decreed that, even if you did have homosexual feelings, you should still marry and have children. It was not in the feelings that one was sinning against God, but in the action.
Let us wind forward to 1885. In Pittsburgh, the Reform movement of America held a conference and launched the so called Pittsburgh Platform, one of the formative documents of progressive Judaism. In part it read ‘we hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age…’. In other words, we do not consider the Torah to be binding on us, when it seems to conflict with our modern understanding and insight. Now in 1885 it is likely that many of those wise rabbis of the Pittsburgh platform may well have been strongly homophobic. Hopefully today we are not. When we say that all are created in the image of God, we must truly mean it. All are different, and in sexual identity, some are heterosexual, some are homosexual, and some are in between, or move over time in their sexual identity. Today we understand that some people have a mismatch between their physical and emotional sexual identity. None of this makes people better or worse, right or wrong. Progressive Judaism, progressive religions in general, should not be prejudiced against any sexual identity. We must address and check our own prejudice, and consider and treat each person as an equal creation of the one, all-loving God.
This is why I spoke last year and again last month at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Multicultural conference. So far as we are concerned, people can be Jewish and Gay, and indeed for years we have been ordaining outwardly gay rabbis within our movement. Rabbi Zylberman kindly directed me to a website and centre at Hebrew Union College for the study of human sexuality and Judaism. There I found a prayer for coming out, and even one to use whilst taking medication for changing gender.
I am reminded of what an orthodox rabbi said at the end of the Jewish Christian Muslim conference last year: What I have to go back and explain to my congregation is that I didn’t meet Christians and Muslims, I met PEOPLE. It is the same with the Queer conference. I didn’t meet Homosexuals and Gays and Queers and Lesbians and Trans-sexuals – I met people, with cares and concerns about their lives and our world, just like everybody else. Sometimes, people like to meet in interest groups, where they share something significant and feel safe and comfortable – like AFL, or an Italian, or an Israeli, background. So we shouldn’t be surprised when gays sometimes also prefer to meet together – indeed they probably face far more prejudice from wider society than Italians or even Israelis!
I am delighted, therefore, to say that we at LBC are able to offer the Aleph group for gay Jews a home for some of their Shabbat, Pesach and New Year Havurot. And gathering together is also empowering. The more numbers, the more so. This is why the Gay Pride rallies have become so important. You might be aware of the huge battle being waged, so far through the courts, but sadly perhaps this week also on the streets, in Jerusalem.
This week the High Court finally ruled that is could go ahead, but Yaacov Ederi, the minister responsible for Jerusalem, called on police commander Ilan Franco to reconsider and to transfer it to another city given the confrontations expected. MK Nissim Zeev of Shas also called for the march to be stopped, saying that the participants should be sent for treatment. According to him 90% of the residents of the capital are against this demonstration.
On Tuesday the police arrested 14 orthodox protestors at an anti-Gay Pride demonstration. On Thursday they released 8 of them. They are not allowed to be in Jerusalem during the next two weeks.
On Thursday evening it was reported that the parade may be cancelled. If the police manpower necessary to safeguard it will interfere with general police operations, they may cancel it, says. Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter. Sounds like he’s been got at!
I don’t have the latest update – but no doubt Israel will be back in the news again this week! And of course, I hope it goes ahead safely and spectacularly. Jerusalem is the capital for all Israelis, not just the ultra-orthodox – within which also, I understand, and as you would expect, there are more than a few gay Jews to be found.
The bible, as we saw, was preoccupied with what it considered to be inappropriate sexual relationships, and, though we would no longer accept its definitions, we would concur that there are appropriate and inappropriate sorts of relationships, and times and places. Sex is ultimately a personal and private matter, as long as it is not exploitative or harmful. Perhaps it is really not the realm of religion?
Finally, I mentioned Aleph a few moments ago, but Melbourne also has a Jewish lesbian group, and one of its key members over many years was a lovely woman named Rochelle Millar who I got to meet just a few times over the past few years. Rochelle was also involved in running the Australian Gay Multicultural council that organises the conferences. Like me, she hailed from the United Kingdom, though her accent revealed that she came from across the Scottish border. She arrived here when she was 14. Michael Barnett knew her for longer than I did so I thank him for this information. He tells me that Rochelle was very proud of being a gay woman, and also of being Jewish. Through both communities she made many lifelong friends and was loyal to them all.
Rochelle had an infectious laugh and smile and a sense of humour and outlook on life that made people want to be around her.
Sadly, the pneumonia with which she was first diagnosed turned out to be aggressive lung cancer, and her health deteriorated fairly rapidly over the past few months. Yet up to the very end Rochelle had a smile on her face and a laugh in her voice. She was an amazing woman that everybody loved and who loved everybody. I believe that this was the closest to a Jewish ceremony that she had, and I am proud to be able to share it with you and with Michael and her other friends who are here this morning. I think Rochelle would be smiling, and would be proud. And I hope that we, as individuals and as a community, will all be a little more open to those who are a bit different, in some way or other, from ourselves. After all, are we not all people, and all made in the image of the one, loving God?
Funny what you find on the Internet. Red Jos has his own take on the leadership of Victorian Jewish community’s unrepresentative and self-styled “umbrella” organisation, the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. He likens it’s president John Searle to a farm animal:
This article was in the Southern Star and is further evidence of attacks on Melbourne’s Jewish gay group Aleph. It was somewhat dismaying to read some comments in the article advising Michael Barnett of Aleph to “calm down”! This is just what must NOT be done to a group calling itself the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, because this is just what it isn’t!! “An Aleph member who asked not to be named……” – what on earth are they frightened of??? And if they are embarrassed by someone having the guts to stand up to the bullies of the JCCV they should leave Aleph and start their own splinter group of quiet timid mice who wouldn’t say boo to a goose such as John Searle and others.
A goose? Naw. Anyone who’s read Animal Farm will see the startling similarities with the Orwellian farm yard’s leadership and that of the JCCV. It’s not a goose at the top of the JCCV, and it’s certainly not kosher.
