BY STEVE WEINSTEIN | There are many traditions during Pride Weekend in West Hollywood, but one of the most enduring — and endearing is the annual Pride Shabbat, the Friday night Sabbath services at Congregation Kol Ami. Presiding over them is the woman who has risen to become one of the most important clerics in Los Angeles, and one of the most prominent rabbis in the country, Rabbi Denise Eger.
As the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical arm of the Reform Jewish movement, Rabbi Eger oversees 2,000 of her peers — the largest such organization in North America. Despite the continuing national exposure that came with her becoming the first out-rabbi to serve as the head of any such organization three years ago, Rabbi Eger keeps her focus squarely on the thriving congregation she herself founded 25 years ago with a handful of LGBT and LGBT-friendly congregants.
For many years, she participated in an annual inter-faith service on the Pride main stage that included 20 stalwarts like Troy Perry, the founder of MCC, the first LGBT-oriented denomination in the world. “Some people involved were anti-religious,” she relates, “so more than a decade the whole inter-faith community would gather at the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega, opposite where they contain the antigay protesters. We would hold our service with amplifiers and lots of music to try to drown out the other with love.”
In past years, the congregation was an active participant in the Pride march, graduating from a contingent of marchers with herself leading in an open car to an elaborate float. She views this year’s push to appeal specifically to millennials with skepticism.
“The reason we got here, to create the conditions where millennials enjoy so many freedoms from oppression,” she notes, “is the generations that went before. With so much left to do, especially the trans community so terrifically under attack, a great opportunity is being missed for solidarity for education by simply turning it into ‘the gay Coachella.’”
She should know. Rabbi Eger’s entire life has been one of “firsts” — from her time in the Reform seminary, when she organized an LGBT group that had to meet far away form the campus; to organizing the Southern California Gay and Lesbian Jewish Professionals Group; to her officiating at the first legal wedding for a lesbian couple in the state in 2008.
In 1988, she became a rabbi at L.A.’s Beth Chayim Chadashim synagogue at the height of the AIDS crisis. “People were dying and West Hollywood was Ground Zero,” she says. She felt the need for a congregation to serve the community and has enjoyed seeing the congregation grow even as the area itself has blossomed. I’ve HIV community institutions grow from start-ups to really strong organizations with a huge reach. I’ve seen a group of young people grow up without the same challenges to stay closeted.”
Kol-Ami has “never been a ‘gay’ congregation,” she emphasizes. “There have always been non-gay families as well as seniors.” The community has served as a haven for the city’s large but dwindling community of Russian immigrants.
It’s a celebration of this diversity — always with one eye on her LGBT congregants — that informs the Shabbat service. Typical of her open-armed acceptance, she encourages anyone — Jewish or not — to join the congregation on June 10.
