"Chief Rabbi: ‘Shuls must embrace gay Jews’"- Britain's Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis urges community to ‘open its heart’ in wake of Orlando massacre

Britain's Chief Rabbi

Quotes from Chief Rabbi Mirvis: 

- In his most far-reaching statement to date on the issue, Mirvis said: “After Orlando, we must take a step beyond condemnation and open our hearts and our synagogues so that no Jew feels persecuted or excluded from the warm embrace of our communities.”

- “At a time of such anguish, it is difficult to adequately convey the depths of our moral revulsion for an individual who was so motivated by hatred that it led him to mass murder,” the Chief Rabbi said.

- “We must also be honest enough to recognise that there are places where the scourge of homophobia persists, even in our own communities, and that is totally unacceptable,” Where hate is religiously motivated, he wrote, faith leaders carry “a particular responsibility to act”.

"Orthodox ‘Dropouts’ Still Tethered To Faith"

8/16/16 by Jonathan Mark NY Jewish Week

"What becomes of these lapsed Orthodox, referred to in the report and in the vernacular as “off the derech” (road), presuming that there ever was a single derech in the first place? Several OTD memoirs and even suicides speak of severed relationships and estrangement from their communities. Or is that simply the experience of those authors and a tragic few?

As Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach used to say, people left Orthodoxy not because it was too much but because it wasn’t enough. His maxim was verified by Nishma’s study, which reports that most OTDs felt “pushed” off the derech, disappointed by the Orthodox community, rather than “pulled” or seduced by the “outside” world."

Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/orthodox-dropouts-still-tethered-faith#6Q9q05G9Hyrf4d3r.99"