Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Madrid Chief Rabbi Calls Gays ‘Deviants’

Madrid’s chief rabbi, Moshe Bendahan, called gays “deviants” who should be re-educated and said same-sex marriages are “monstrous.”

Moshe Bendahan

“Homosexuality is a deviation from nature,” Bendahan is quoted as telling the online news site Religion Digital in an interview published Wednesday. “It’s an anti-natural tendency and a sin. Contemplating allowing, consenting to what is known as ‘gay marriages’ would be a monstrosity.”

Over the last few years, several senior rabbis in Western Europe have gotten into trouble for their remarks on gays.

In January 2012, Amsterdam’s chief rabbi, Aryeh Ralbag, was briefly suspended by the board of the Jewish community for having co-signed a statement that described homosexuality as an inclination from which one can be “healed.”

Gilles Bernheim, France’s former chief rabbi, criticized the social effects of same-sex unions in a controversial document from 2012 and wrote that the “biblical view on romantic partnerships” is “exclusively between men and women.” But he also condemned “physical and verbal attacks on gays with the same intensity as I condemn anti-Semitic attacks.”

In the interview with Religion Digitial, Bendahan is also quoted as saying, “The plan of God knows no other pairing besides that of a woman and man. The pastoral duties with regards to homosexuals are focused on re-educating them about their tendencies to return them to normal.”

If techniques to “cure” gays of their sexual tendencies fail, he said “We don’t excommunicate the homosexuals from our communities but we continue to believe in their conversion. The Bible is and always had been for us our protocol, our point of reference.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.