200 Leading Rabbis Sign Letter Describing Gay People As ‘Perverts’
More than 200 leading rabbis published a letter condemning the idea of surrogacy and adoption for gays, describing homosexuals as “perverts,” The Jerusalem Post reported.
In the letter, released Thursday, the rabbis wrote that “the aggressive terror which accompanies the media’s brainwashing” designed to “destroy the concept of family and turn perverts into heroes will not succeed, and nor will the attempt to silence rabbis and sane people and turn them into delusional extremists.”
It was signed by prominent leaders of the hardline wing of the national-religious community, including Rabbi Dov Lior; president of the Har Hamor Yeshiva Rabbi Tzvi Tau; Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Eliyahu; co-dean of the Eli pre-military academy Rabbi Yigal Levenstein; dean of the Ateret Yerushalayim Yeshiva Rabbi Shlomo Aviner; and Rabbi Ouri Cherki, an educator in the Machon Meir yeshiva.
The rabbis said they were writing in defense of Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Aryeh Stern, who said last week that allowing surrogacy for gay couples would cause “children to be born and enter a very strange and unnatural life, a life without a mother and father,” and that these children’s lives would become “wretched.”
Stern’s comments addressed the strong backlash to the new surrogacy law recently passed in the Knesset, which extended access to surrogacy to include single women but not single men or gay couples.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO