Gay rights organizations demanded Tuesday that one of Jerusalem’s two chief rabbis take back remarks he made declaring that homosexuals cannot be religious and that homosexuality is uncontrolled lust that can be conquered by belief in God.
Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of the capital, made the comments during a sermon last weekend in Ashdod. A short video of his remarks was published by the Kan public broadcaster on Monday evening.
The incident came after earlier this month Education Minister Rafi Peretz, also an ordained rabbi, caused uproar by indicating his support for gay conversion therapy, a controversial process that purports to make gay people heterosexual.
Amar, a former chief rabbi of Israel, has also caused controversy in the past by saying that homosexuality is an “abomination.”
Portrait of Sephardi Shlomo Amar, at the time Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, on November 3 , 2010. (Abir Sultan/Flash 90) “There are people who call themselves religious who also fell into that trap,” Amar told the audience in reference to gay people. “They aren’t religious. It would be better if they cast off their kippah and Shabbat [observance] and show their true faces.
“With their bodies they sin against the Jewish people,” he said, using a Talmudic phrase meaning they are irreligious.
“God knows that it is a lust, a wild lust that needs to be overcome and it can be overcome,” Amar continued.
Referring to conversion therapy, Amar said, “Everyone can overcome. There’s no need for understanding or a psychologist or any nonsense. All they need is to be God-fearing — just belief in God to overcome.”
Three gay religious support groups, Bat-Kol, Havruta, and the Gay Religious Community, issued a joint statement Tuesday questioning by what authority Amar could decide their commitment to religion. “As religious men and women it is not clear to us from where the rabbi draws the power to push us out of Judaism. How does he dare to ask us to give up Shabbat observance and so give up on our religious identity?”
“Rabbi Amar, with your harsh comments you called on our families to vomit us out of our homes and from our communities.”
Eran Globus, director of the Jerusalem Open House, the capital’s leading gay organization, called on Amar to contemplate the damaging effect of his comments.
“Rabbi, we are those whom you meet at the ceremonies and in the yeshivas, in the city streets and in the synagogues,” Globus said in a statement. “Try to think of these thousands of young faces you have seen, looking at you with respect and awe, so that you can begin to grasp the unbearable price they are paying for your irresponsible words.
“We call on you to retract your harsh remarks,” Globus said.