LGBT Outreach Program
by Anath Hartmann
Years of underrepresentation has prompted a District resident to spearhead a program to reach out to gay and lesbian Jews in the D.C. area.
The Stuart S. Kurlander Fund for Gay and Lesbian Outreach and Engagement, named after its founder and primary donor and affectionately nicknamed “GLOE” by those involved in its planning, will be inaugurated into the Washington DC Jewish Community Center this weekend.
“I wish I could say there was one thing that triggered it,” but there wasn’t, said Kurlander, an openly gay DCJCC board member and area attorney who began planning for the fund last June
The fortysomething Kurlander has himself long been involved in the Jewish community. His first Jewish leadership position was president of the junior congregation at his synagogue, and he’s since been involved in not just the DCJCC, but the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, International Association of Jewish Lawyers and United Jewish Communities.
And, he founded the American Friends of the Agudah, a gay and lesbian civil rights organization in Israel.
But, Kurlander was bothered by the dearth of gays and lesbians active in the Jewish community. “It just got to the point where I thought, ‘There should be more [gays and lesbians] who are involved in the Jewish community.’ ... In order to reach the unaffiliated, you have to have programming that will get them engaged.”
The kick-off weekend will include a kabbalat Shabbat, a Shabbat dinner, a GLOE-sponsored DC Minyan Shabbat morning service, a film, a luncheon and a roundtable discussion titled “Capote - Breaking the Mold,” about Truman Capote, the In Cold Blood author.
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) will join Rabbi Steven Greenberg, author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, for the luncheon and its accompanying panel discussion - “Faith based Politics: How It Impacts the Jewish Gay Community” - as well as for the Capote talk. Openly gay, both Frank and Greenberg are thus minorities in their respective careers.
Kurlander added that while GLOE is geared toward the Jewish community’s gay and lesbian members, “it’s broadly open to everyone.”
GLOE has already unofficially taken part in several events, including December’s DCJCC Film Festival, where Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School was screened, and the DCJCC’s Jan. 6 run of Betty Rules: The Exception to the Musical, a play about an all-girl band formed in a Fairfax basement.
Kurlander, who said he does not expect any negative feedback from the community about GLOE, noted the fund has a number of tentative, upcoming events in the works, but he would not say what they were.
Margaret Hahn Stern, the DCJCC’s assistant executive director, said GLOE’s goal is not to separate Jewish gays from their heterosexual counterparts in the community.
“It’s not a dating service or a gay JDate,” she clarified. “It’s a way of engaging the Jewish gay and lesbian community into the Jewish community as a whole, not a way to segregate anyone.”
Both gays and straights may sit on GLOE’s committee.
Billy Kreisberg, immediate past president of the DCJCC and a GLOE committee member, agrees with Kurlander on the need for the program. “The federation wasn’t reaching out effectively and [the DCJCC] wasn’t reaching out effectively, either,” he said. “I think this kind of program has got tremendous potential and we can do a lot with it.”
Adam Falk, who recently started the D.C. Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender (GLBT) cluster of Gesher City, a national organization that provides networking and social opportunities for Jewish adults, joined GLOE’s ranks as a member of its committee last summer after going on a Kurlander-led UJC Pride in Israel mission. The trip to the Jewish state was for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews.
“The JCC has a lot of wonderful activities - film, theater activities,” said Falk. “[GLOE] will bring in gay/lesbian Jews, but also bring in people for the theater program as well. ... In general, it’s hard to engage young single people, whether they’re gay or straight, and it’s always important to try to create the right type of programming to appeal to people. In this case, those people are gay/lesbian Jews.”
He also noted that the number of gay outreach programs has gone up in recent months.
“There’s been a lot of organization of gay/lesbian Jews in the last year,” Falk continued, citing his Gesher City cluster and Gesher’s recently founded “Nice Jewish Girls D.C.,” a lesbian cluster, as examples. “All those groups will feed into GLOE, and GLOE can help promote those as well.”
Erica Gloger, a GLOE committee member, became involved in the fund primarily because Kurlander asked her to do so.
“GLOE is not about gay people coming together and saying, ‘We want a program just for us,’ ” she said. “It’s a way of saying, ‘These issues are important to the Jewish community, shouldn’t there be an effort to have inclusive programming?’ ”
Content © 2006 Washington Jewish Week