According to Mordechai Levovitz, the co-founder and executive director of Jewish Queer Youth, a group supporting and empowering LGBT young people in the Jewish community, over 70 percent of drop-in participants report suicidal thoughts or past suicide attempts. [...]
Upon realizing he wasn’t “any less of a man for being gay,” and in retrospect understanding the harms of conversion therapy, Penner returned to the United States and told his Modern Orthodox parents he would live as a Jewish gay man. “Having a gay son in the Orthodox community is considered anywhere between shameful and a failure – it was at the time, at least – and it took them a while to get over that,” he says. [...]
Levovitz says one of the main obstacles LGBT Orthodox youth face today is a “strange form of homophobia,” expressed in the pressure the family applies once someone comes out. “Their family will say, ‘We don’t have a problem with you being gay, but the community has a problem and they will punish your brother and your sister, and your father’s job will be in jeopardy.’”
Kicking children out of the house is less common in Modern Orthodoxy, Levovitz says, though it’s still prevalent in the ultra-Orthodox community. But he sees the predominant issue within Orthodoxy today in the cop-outs of parents, schools and “well-meaning rabbis.”
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