When a religious Knesset member was pressured by his party into resigning last week after attending the wedding of a gay nephew, many Israelis saw it as further proof of the intolerance and rigidity in the ultra-Orthodox world. But others saw just the opposite.
The real news, they insisted, was not that Yigal Guetta had been given the boot from the Shas party, but rather that an ultra-Orthodox politician in Israel had attended a gay wedding, had urged other members of his family to join him and was not afraid to speak about it publicly. [...]
Guetta had publicized the fact that he attended the wedding in an Army Radio interview early last week. Although he insisted he was opposed to gay marriage, Guetta explained that for him, family ties took precedence and he believed it was his duty to honor his sister by attending her son’s wedding. [...]
“Not only homosexuality, but also other phenomena once considered to be stains on the family or the community – mental illness, for example, or children who left the Orthodox way of life,” he says. “These are phenomena the Haredi community has been starting to come to terms with. There is a growing understanding that they exist, that they can’t be hidden or denied, and that they have to be dealt with.” [...]
As El Or notes: “Ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Jews tend to be much more tolerant and accepting of those who are different than their Ashkenazi counterparts. In the Sephardi community, it is much less common for families to cut ties with children who come out as gay – so in a way I’m not surprised it was someone from Shas involved in this incident.” Within the party itself, Guetta belonged to the more moderate wing.
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