by Emily Goldberg in JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)
Days after Yeshiva University made a joint announcement with a student group that the private, flagship Modern Orthodox Jewish educational institution would recognize an official LGBT student group, both the school’s president and one of its most senior rabbinic deans say that they have regrets, though it is not clear that they are apologetic for the same reasons.
Yeshiva and the students settled a five-year court case on March 20 and stated that the new club, Hareni, “will seek to support LGBTQ students and their allies and will operate in accordance with the approved guidelines of Yeshiva University’s senior rabbis.” Hayley Goldberg, co-president of the club, told JNS that “this victory is not just for our club” but is “for every student who deserves a safe space to be themselves.”
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In a statement at the time, a Yeshiva spokesman said that the students had agreed to “the same club approved by our senior rabbis two and a half years ago.”
In an open letter dated 24 Adar, which began on Sunday night, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a faculty member at the school who is one of the most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis to issue religious rulings, wrote that “two and a half years ago, when I was last consulted, I gave my blessing to a Yeshiva University initiative to help students struggling with problems of same sex attraction and gender identity.”
“My position, then as now, emphatically rejects the ideology, lifestyle and behaviors which the LGBTQ term represents,” he wrote. (JNS verified the letter’s authenticity.)
His view remains that religious prohibitions, including on same-sex marriage, “obviously must be uncompromisingly upheld,” the rabbi added in the letter. “Simultaneously, all halachically legitimate means of support should be provided to struggling students to foster and sustain their uncompromising commitment to all of the above.”
“Experience has attested that allowing this initiative to take the form of a club has and continues to create confusion,” Schachter wrote. “I very much regret that I did not previously recognize this factor. Establishing any additional club in any Orthodox institution will only add to that confusion and must be avoided.”
“We should not run to label people based upon what they believe about themselves or their bodies,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS. “An individual’s desire to adopt a lifestyle at variance with Torah observance is something that both deserves and requires consultation with an individual rav.”
“for LGBTQ students striving to live authentic Torah lives” and was “approved by the administration, in partnership with lay leadership, and endorsed by senior roshei yeshiva”—in 2022, the year after the proposed student group YU Pride Alliance sued the university’s president and vice provost, alleging that Yeshiva denied the club official recognition.
Yeshiva calls itself “the world’s flagship Jewish university” and says that it is “rooted in Jewish thought and tradition.” U.S. News & World Report, which has ranked colleges and universities for decades, told JNS that Yeshiva did not report a religious affiliation in the data provided for the rankings.
Read the full article at JNS.
Photo credit: Yeshiva University Zysman Hall from Northeast by Beyond My Ken, with CC BY-SA 4.0 license on Wikipedia