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Rabbi Opening Doors to Outsiders


Nelly Shulman is used to being remarked on: She is, after all, the first Russian-born female rabbi in the former Soviet Union. But this was something she wanted to stay low-key.

Sensationalist press articles reported in May that, a few weeks earlier, Shulman had performed Russia's first lesbian wedding. Photos with one article showed Shulman, a rabbi in the progressive denomination, reading the ceremony to a couple with matching cropped hair and khaki-colored jackets.

"I got 100 hate mails a day," Shulman said at the Moscow Jewish Community House. "Hate calls as well. They said lots of different things -- like that I was a dirty lesbian myself."

Damning criticism came from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, a traditional Orthodox group that does not perform homosexual ceremonies, nor ordain female rabbis. "We considered it necessary to announce our protest at this shocking trampling on the norms of Judaism," said Rabbi Boruch Gorin, director of the public affairs department of the federation.

Shulman, 34, stiffened as she recalled the vociferousness of the response. But in the career she has chosen, controversy is sometimes inevitable. She caters, as she put it, "in many cases to those for whom the doors of the Orthodox synagogue are still closed": Jews who marry non-Jews, people with only distant Jewish relatives, gays and lesbians.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/12/04/021.html