North Carolina Pride Changes Schedule To Avoid Yom Kippur
(JTA) — Organizers of North Carolina’s gay pride parade and festival have altered the event’s schedule in order to accommodate the Jewish community.
The N.C. Pride parade had been scheduled for Sept. 30, which this year is Yom Kippur.
Following the announcement of the date last month, organizers apologized for scheduling the parade for Yom Kippur and said they could not change the date. They said the parade has been held on the last Saturday of September for the past 17 years.
N.C. Pride organizers announced Friday that it had rebranded the event as N.C. Pride @ Night, a street fair that would start in downtown Durham and in downtown Raleigh at 4 p.m. on Sept. 30 and run until 4 a.m. on Oct. 1. The Pride Parade was cancelled for this year but is scheduled to return for 2018.
Jewish Federation of Durham-Chapel Hill CEO Jill Madsen said that her agency is still planning to hold an alternative event planned for the Jewish community to celebrate LGBTQ pride set for Oct. 7. Madsen told local media that she was “grateful” for the compromise from N.C. Pride.
The event will start with Havdallah to end the Jewish Sabbath, Madsen told the news paper. “It falls during the holiday of Sukkot, which is our fall harvest holiday, and one of the practices of Sukkot is inviting someone into your home for a meal. So we thought, what a wonderful opportunity to open up our building and show our support,” Madsen said.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO