Responding to condemnation by chief rabbis and other clergy of international parade this summer, moderate rabbis voice their support.

Underscoring the rift within Judaism over its attitude toward homosexuality, leaders of the Reform, Conservative/Masorti and Reconstructionist streams in Israel voiced their support this week for the gay and lesbian International Jerusalem WorldPride festival slated for the capital Aug. 18-28.

At a press conference Tuesday at the Jerusalem Open House, a meeting place and action center for Jerusalem’s close-knit but largely closeted gay and lesbian community, rabbis from the Israel branches of the three non-Orthodox movements officially gave their blessing to the event. The festival will include a parade downtown, a film festival and an interfaith conference.

The movements decided to officially announce their support in the wake of widespread condemnation of WorldPride, which is held in a different locale every five years, by an array of high-ranking religious leaders. On March 30, in an almost unprecedented show of consensus, Israel’s two chief rabbis joined influential Muslim sheiks and the local heads of the major churches to roundly denounce the festival.

“They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable,” Shlomo Amar, Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, said at the time.

Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, said the festival, if held, would be “very ugly” and “very nasty.”

Several religious Knesset members have joined with Evangelical Christians to launch a petition campaign to prevent the festival from taking place. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America and one of the petition’s staunchest backers, told reporters that holding the event in Jerusalem would be tantamount to the “spiritual rape of Jerusalem.”

Given the intense opposition not only to their event but their lifestyle, the city’s gay-rights activists said they were doubly grateful for the show of solidarity by the more moderate streams.

“It’s very empowering,” Noa Sattath, chair of the Jerusalem Open House, said in an interview. “It’s very important to be validated by our religious friends.”

Flanked by the rainbow flags that have become synonymous with the gay and lesbian pride movement, the rabbis at the press conference said they felt compelled to counter the “vulgar expressions” of their less-moderate colleagues.

‘We reject and condemn in the strongest possible terms the attempts to block this event articulated by some clergy of various faiths, in particular … statements that denigrate the full humanity of GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual) individuals,” said Rabbi Amy Klein, director of the Midrasha of the Reconstructionist movement in Israel.

Jerusalem, Rabbi Klein said, “is not the province of one faith tradition or of one wing of a faith tradition.”

Rabbi Na’amah Kelman-Ezrachi, who heads the overseas department of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, called Judaism “a loving, compassionate religion.” For this reason, she said, “it is incumbent to welcome the WorldPride parade and conference, and to march with it.”

Rabbi Kelman-Ezrachi’s statement came on the heels of a recent endorsement of the festival by the World Council for Progressive (Reform) Judaism as “an international celebration of diversity, tolerance and human respect.”

The WCPJ, which boasts 1.5 million members, represents approximately 900 Reform congregations.

While the Reform movements in Israel and the diaspora are of one mind on the issue of gay and lesbian rights, there is no such consensus in the Conservative movement.

Despite its reputation for being more traditional in its approach to Judaism than its American counterpart, the Masorti movement in Israel is backing the gay and lesbian community’s right to organize the festival even though the American Conservative movement as a whole had not done so by Tuesday.

‘We are not endorsing” the festival, Rabbi Ehud Bandel, president of the Masorti/Conservative movement, said in an interview. “We are not going to march in the parade ourselves under the banner of the Masorti movement. What we are doing is protecting the community’s right to hold this event in the face of so much hatred. We’re doing this in the name of free speech and tolerance.”

Rabbi Bandel said he had asked the festival’s organizers “to show respect for the people of Jerusalem and to make sure the march in Jerusalem will not be similar to the gay marches in San Francisco,” which have a reputation for being outrageous. “We’ve asked them to remember the holiness of this city, and from what I’ve seen in Web sites, this request is being honored.”

When a reporter asked the organizers whether the parade participants would be encouraged to dress modestly, Sattath noted with a smile that the event is scheduled for the evening, “when it will be less inviting to people to take their clothes off.”

Sattath said the Jerusalem Open House has asked potential participants “to come and make a significant statement about tolerance, not to have a wild party.”

In an interview, Rabbi Andrew Sachs, director of the Rabbinical Assembly in Israel (Masorti), noted that Jerusalem’s small-scale gay pride parades in Jerusalem the past three years “have all been tasteful and respectful of Jerusalem’s population. There is no reason to believe this event will be any different.”

While festival organizers said they have received the backing of many “individual” Conservative and Orthodox rabbis, the top leaders of both streams have been extremely reluctant to support the festival on behalf of their organizations.

“Unfortunately, organized bodies are not yet ready to be so bold,” said Rabbi Ayelet Cohen of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York City.

In a phone interview, Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the American Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, acknowledged that he had declined recently to sign a petition in support of the festival circulated by CBST.

“We cannot endorse a parade, but I would support Rabbi Bandel’s statement,” Rabbi Meyers said, clearly uncomfortable discussing the subject.

When asked why the RA opposed the march and events surrounding it, Rabbi Meyers said, “I don’t want to get into that.” Rather than criticize the Conservative movement, Rabbi Cohen, who was ordained by the Conservative movement, chose to put a more positive spin on the RA’s decision.

“The American Conservative movement has a great opportunity to learn from the leadership of the Israeli Masorti movement,” she said. “I hope they will.”

Ironically, Israeli politics and not religious sensibilities could ultimately torpedo the gay-lesbian parade, due to a scheduling conflict.

A reporter at the press briefing said the Jerusalem Police might decide to cancel the march if the redeployment from Gaza is postponed until mid- to late August, so it does not fall during the three-week mourning period preceding Tisha b’Av. The drain on the police could be too great, the reporter said.

“We’re not here to discuss politics,” said Rabbi David Lazar, the only Masorti rabbi in Israel who openly performs gay and lesbian marriages. “I can assure you that the parade will go on.”