Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a Longtime Jewish LGBTQ Institution, Turns 50

Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), located on West 30th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, threw a celebration on December 3 to celebrate its 50th anniversary as the world’s largest LGBTQ synagogue. The congregation’s first meeting took place in 1973 in a church classroom, where a small group of gay men (some say just two) celebrated Passover Seder together. Three years later, the swelling congregation moved to a loft in the Westbeth Complex in Greenwich Village. In 2016, CBST moved again to the Cass Gilbert building, which the synagogue describes as its permanent home.

Though the Cass Gilbert site can host many more congregants than the humble church classroom, it still would not suffice to contain the over 500 celebration attendees, who paid $75 for a ticket or made a larger donation. They gathered instead in the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, which calls itself a “home for all things Jewish in this shtetl [Yiddish for small Ashkenazi Jewish towns in Eastern Europe] we call New York.” According to the CBST website, all proceeds will benefit the CBST Fund for the Future, “a community-wide campaign to raise $3 million to ensure CBST’s commitment to meaningful, enriching, bold, progressive goals and actions for the next 50 years.”

“Fifty & Fabulous: Honoring Our Past, Celebrating Our Future” took part in two acts. The first was a program and concert co-emceed by talk show host Andy Cohen and CBST Senior Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, who assumed her position in 1992. “We’ve come a tremendous way in these fifty years,” she said in her remarks. “It can be hard for us to remember or for the young among us to imagine what those days were like, what a revolutionary idea it was that being Jewish and being gay were not in conflict with one another, that this small group of gay men could worship as their true selves, both deeply Jewish, and openly gay.”

Longtime members of CBST told the stories of how they entered the community, accompanied by a cellist and pianist. “I didn’t feel like a stranger,” said Saul Zalkin, a member since 1978 recalling his first attendance. “I didn’t need anyone to bring me. I arrived all by myself.” Among the performers were CBST cantor Sam Rosen, who sang “Corner of the Sky” from the hit musical Pippin, which won its Tony Award in the same year of CBST’s founding. An unusual combination of string quartet, clarinetist, and pianist, all regular CBST congregants, performed Sergey Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes.

Throughout the program, Kleinbaum narrated the history of the congregation as well as its significance and meaning to its members. CBST began as an all-volunteer synagogue, but the raging AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s and the urgent need for pastoral support and spiritual guidance convinced congregation leaders to search for a rabbi. After a two-year process, the CBST Board of Trustees found Kleinbaum, and in 1992 she was formally appointed to her post. Within her first month as rabbi, she officiated at four funerals, including that of Mel Rosen, one the first congregants to support the idea of a CBST rabbi.

According to CBST’s website, over 150 of its members died of AIDS between 1982 and 1997. “One congregant struggled with the spiritual questions raised by this crisis,” Kleinbaum remembered. “Where is God when we think we choose life, and then tragedy strikes? When someone contracts AIDS and dies of the disease, where is God? God is in the compassion we feel for the sick and the stricken. God is in our resolve to fight for more responsible governmental action. God is in the strength that we must all search for as we make our way through the shadow.”

If Act One was a mixture of communal joy and sobering remembrance, Act Two attempted no such balance. It was a time for the attendees to dance, eat, and drink the night away and save their worries for Monday morning.