Grandson Of Former Israeli Chief Rabbi To Tie Knot With A Man
Image by gettyimages
(JTA) — A grandson of a former chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel reportedly will exchange wedding vows with a man at a ceremony led by a religious gay woman.
Ovadia Cohen, whose late grandfather Ovadia Yosef was the Shas party spiritual leader and Israel’s foremost Sephardic halachic authority, will tie the knot next week with Amichai Landsman, Ynet reported Thursday.
Cohen was very close to his grandfather, according to Ynet. His parents divorced when he was a child, leading the rabbi to take an active role in his upbringing, he told Ynet. Yosef died in 2013.
Cohen had been married to a woman with whom he had two children, but they divorced and Cohen came out as gay. Three years ago he met Landsman, who grew up in a religious Zionist community in Haifa, and the two moved in together while maintaining a religious lifestyle.
Cohen has had “very partial” contact with his family following his coming out. Landsman says his religious family has come to “accept” him.
The ceremony celebrating the couple’s union will be led by Zahorit Sorek, a prominent activist in the gay religious community and a member of the Yesh Atid party, whose fight against what it considers religious coercion regularly puts it on a collision course with Shas.
The State of Israel does not have a civil marriage option and all state-recognized wedding ceremonies must be conducted by a cleric. However, it does recognize partnerships between same-sex spouses who register as living together.
Contact Haley Cohen at [email protected]
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
