Gay Jews Hope To Float Their Own Boat in Amsterdam Pride Parade
Image by wikimedia
Amsterdam’s annual gay boat parade may feature a Jewish float for the first time.
The Jewish boat for the Amsterdam Pride Canal Parade 2014 is a project launched by a group called Exodays, whose board is made up of several young Jewish activists.
“For a long time Amsterdam has been called the Gay Capital of the World. Jews have played leading roles in this process and marked its landscape,” the group’s website reads.
The 2014 event will be the 19th year straight that the parade — which organizers say is the world’s only regularly-held aquatic event of its kind — will take place.
The boat is one part of a three-day event for gay Jews from all over the world that Exodays is organizing in Amsterdam set for August 1st to 3rd.
To participate in the Amsterdam Pride Canal Parade 2014, the group that is organizing the Jewish boat needs to be selected in a lottery next week.
Every year, more than 100 boats compete for approximately 80 spots that are allowed to take part in the annual event. In previous years, the event has drawn thousands of participants from dozens of countries and tens of thousands of spectators who huddle along Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal to watch the colorful, themed floats chart a west-to-east course of roughly two to four hours.
A message from our Publisher & CEO 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.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
