By Sarah Patt
December 4, 2017
Rick Landman is a member of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBT synagogue. The Congregation was founded in 1973 and serves as a place of worship for LGBT identifying Jews and their allies.
“My name is Rick Landman, I’m an attorney and a retired professor. I started going to CBST in 1973, I was on the board of directors for a while, I have been on many of the committees, and now I’m just a member of the congregation.
Both of my parents were German-Jewish refugees so part of my Jewishness comes from a much more of a direct link to the Holocaust than a lot of other American Jews. Back in 1965, I was being Bar Mitzvahed which happened to be the last Shabbos of in June, exactly 4 years before Stonewall. That year we were talking in class about how Jewish boys and girls get married. My teacher, Mr Rosenberg, would go and he would pick a taller boy and a shorter girl, and put them up to the front of the room, one in the corner, one in the middle, and one at the other- and he was showing people what is was like to get married. I’m 5’2”. Now. So at that time, I was a little bit shorter. So, when he came to me, he goes, “Mordecai,” which is my hebrew name, he goes, “I’m sorry but there’s no girls shorter than you. So you just watch everyone else in the front, and when you get married, that’s what you’ll do.” I raise my hand and say, “I’m not really into girls, is there a bracha for two boys to get married?” Mr Rosenberg got so red, and he took me out into the hallway, left the class alone– which had really never happened– and yelled at me, “No, no, no, never, never, never will two boys ever get married– are you serious? I’m going to call your parents, and bring you in here–” I think I raised my hand and was able to say that question because I was just very sheltered. But then, once you know that you’re gay, it’s very difficult to read that you should be killed.
In 1971, I was already out to my parents, but I was going to go to the March on Albany for Gay Rights and there was a potential of either getting arrested or getting my picture in the paper or something. And I called up and I was speaking to my parents about it, and my father said, “Ricky, maybe I can help you here. When I was exactly your age, I would be coming home from school, and I’d have to walk across the street if I saw people coming, because I was afraid they’d beat me up. And I asked my mother, “What the hell did the Jews do? Why does everyone hate us so much?” And then he said to me, his mother said, “You just have to love yourself, we love you, but the Jews did nothing wrong. The whole world is wrong.” So he said, “Ricky, the same thing with homosexuals, the whole world is wrong. Everyone says you’re no good, but you’re the same son you were to me before I knew you were gay–” or homosexual, or whatever we’d say at the time. “But you have to love yourself and be strong, your life may be harder but you are who you are and your mother and father will always support you.”
My parents, they went through and saw when a society went totally crazy. And they came out of it not with animus, but with love.
It was in April of 1973 during Passover, my mother read the article, a little paragraph that stated that CBST had been created. My mother said to me, “you know, you said one day there’d be a gay synagogue and I thought you were crazy? Well there’s a gay synagogue, so get dressed and go to shul.” And now, there are very few people alive who were there earlier than I was. It’s Congregation of the House of the Joy of Torah– Congregation Beit Simchat Toros– Simchat Torah. Originally it was mostly men, and then CBST went through sort of a lesbian visibility, and it’s gone for the past 40 years, through so many different conflicts just as the LGBT movement has.”
“Gilbert Baker, who passed away this year, he made those four flags. He originally made them in California, in San Francisco and CBST asked him to make four flags, that are hanging there in our lobby.”
“We had two AIDS quilts, and unfortunately one of them is missing. We participated in the quilt project where, I mean, we went down to Washington D.C. when they put it all out on the national mall. About a third of our congregation passed away from HIV/AIDS. The ramifications on the people who survived is something that’s never really discussed and worked out. And, again, in my unique position of being a child of Holocaust survivors and saw how my parents generation– now you go and you say of course they had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, They were in concentration camps they lost their parents they lost their siblings, they hid, they fled, they were refugees. Gee. But growing up, it was very important for those Jews to not be considered different or sick or psychologically anything. I didn’t know my father was in Dachau until like the 1980s. It stayed inside of them, and they never really dealt with it. The same problem is happening with, I think, people my age who went through the HIV/AIDS era. I lost so many friends– and lover– and because i didn’t get HIV and I survived, one wouldn’t really want to say that I had a difficult time or anything– but of course we did. Not only the survivor’s guilt, it’s just you lost so many of your friends. And the fear of the early years, of wondering– before we knew exactly what it was– were we going to be next? It definitely has left marks on all of us that we don’t know exactly what they are. So of course, losing a third of our congregation. Including our– including Mel Rosen, was the president, he died; Irving Copperburg was the president, he died, it was something that was really a major struggle that we had to deal with.”
“After the election of our current president, our Rabbi, the next day, decided she wanted to do something. And she knows the Imam from the Islamic center here at NYU, so she decided to create this concept which we call the ‘House of Peace’ where members of CBST come and stand here in front of the Islamic center at NYU, and we just say, like, ‘Jews Supporting Muslims’. My father watched the synagogue of Ostberg be burned down on Kristallnacht, so my sign is basically that if only the Germans had stood in front of synagogues in 1933, you know, maybe Kristallnacht wouldn’t have happened.
The irony of it is, I didn’t really know any openly out Muslims before this year, and now I have so many Muslim friends, including on facebook and in real life. So, in a way– basically, thanks to Donald Trump, I have more friends and I understood them now better than I would’ve. I did come last week, when it was Kristallnacht. It was much more meaningful. I actually brought a Jewish star, Yuda, that my grandfather brought to America. But, I’m hoping we survive through this difficult time in our country, and go back to a time where it was really great, where we took in immigrants, when we took in millions of immigrants, when we took in refugees and asylum seekers. And go back to a country where we are not so nationalistic, and militaristic, and supremacy based on religion and all these things, and begin getting back to the fact that we’re all created– if you’re religious then we’re all created by the same G-d! And we stop this adamis about immigrants and remember that America was created by immigrants, for immigrants.”