Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Philly Mayor to Officiate Same-Sex Marriage For Israeli Diplomat

An Israeli diplomat will be married in a same-sex marriage ceremony conducted by the mayor of Philadelphia.

Elad Strohmyer, Deputy Consul General of Israel in Philadelphia and his partner Oren Ben-Joseph will be married at the Philadelphia City Hall this week, Ynet reported. Mayor Michael Nutter and conservative Rabbi Michael Bills will officiate.

Gay marriage has been legal in Pennsylvania since May 2014.

Strohmyer met Ben-Joseph during a gay pride event in Tel Aviv last June; Ben-Joseph joined him in Philadelphia shortly after. They were engaged in October.

“It’s a big honor for me to get married in the city that has been my home for the past three years and in which I represent Israel,” Strohmyer told Ynet. “The fact that the local media and the leadership of the community is expressing great interest and will come to the wedding is really moving and also enables us to expose another facet of Israel that is not usually displayed in world media. Through our wedding that has been awarded with a high media profile we are adding another important element of representing Israel other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Some 150 guests, including friends and family from Israel, will attend the wedding, according to Ynet.

It is the first time Nutter will conduct a wedding ceremony for a diplomat and only the fourth time he has officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony.

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

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.