The Jewish Board of Education this week banned gay American Rabbi Steven Greenberg from addressing students at Johannesburg’s King David High School — during the school’s ”tolerance week”.
The soft-spoken Greenberg, who holds a philosophy degree, is visiting South Africa to break down anti-gay prejudice among Jews. However, he has not been welcomed by official Jewish institutions.
Greenberg’s tour, to promote his book Wrestling with G-d and the documentary Trembling before G-d, in which he appears, has been supported by liberal South African Jewry.
But lawyer and tour organiser David Bilchitz has circulated a list of interventions by Jewish authorities intended to undermine Greenberg’s visit. These include an accusation that ”rabbinic interference led to the cancellation of a screening at the Rabbi Cyril Harris Community Centre”, and that the Beth Din forced kosher restaurants to remove posters and flyers for the movie from their establishments.
The drama came to a head this week when Greenberg was supposed to address grade 11 and 12 pupils of King David High School, Victory Park, as part of a tolerance week programme.
By its own admission, the Jewish Board of Education stepped in and forbade Greenberg’s appearance. Bilchitz’s letter to the media says school staff ”organised a private event at the Beaconsfield club across the road. As a result of interference from the Beth Din this event too was cancelled.”
Rabbi Craig Kacev, director of the South African Board of Jewish Education, said that the incident was ”an internal matter that took place inside the school”. He accused Bilchitz and company of being ”individuals who are not part of the school community, using this to their ends”.
Kacev emphasised that gay ”individuals should be respected as a human being as much as anyone else” and that ”difference in opinion does not permit one to disregard dignity”. But he added that ”giving [Greenberg] the platform to express his agenda is giving credibility to something that is not an accepted orthodox view”.
”An orthodox view expresses teaching children about healthy heterosexual lifestyles and family orientation — that’s the focus of our education,” Kacev said.
Greenberg ”may be a fantastic person and is welcome in the Jewish community, obviously,” he added.ÂÂ
He said the school was open to being addressed by, for example, a former pupil who had been discriminated against because he was effeminate. But he could not allow ”every possible life view to be expressed in the school. I don’t believe any home is open to that. Then parents should expose their children to sex workers because it’s an acceptable way of life for some people.”
On February 23 Greenberg and film director Sandi Simcha Dubowski were given a platform to speak at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research whose director, Deborah Posel, has children at King David. Introducing Greenberg, Posel said:
”I am acutely aware of the need for more open and critical debate within the Jewish community. This is a community which is heterogenous and divided, which is perfectly normal.
”In some parts of the Jewish community in this country, there seems to be a fear that exposing our differences to the outside is somehow a weakness. The community is quite unpractised in speaking openly about these differences in mutually tolerant ways.”
Greenberg said that in his tours to other countries he had visited schools with great success. He said that at King David ”there is a group of people who actually want an orthodoxy that is fearless”.
There will be an additional screening of Trembling before G-d on Sunday February 27 at Nu Metro Killarney at 5.15pm. Filmmaker Sandi Simcha Dubowski and Rabbi Steven Greenberg will be present