Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Orthodox Hire Mexicans To Wear Tzitzit and Protest Gay Pride

An Orthodox Jewish group hired Mexican laborers to protest for them at the gay pride parade in New York.

A reporter for The New York Times witnessed the group of Mexican men picketing for the Jewish Political Action Committee, a fringe Hasidic group based in Brooklyn, at Sunday’s parade in Manhattan.

The hired protesters wore ritual fringes, or tzitzit, and held up signs protesting homosexuality and same-sex marriage, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 26.

Read: Worst Way To Protest Gay Pride Ever

Heshie Freed, a member of the Jewish Political Action Committee, told the Times that the men were hired to fill in for “yeshiva boys” who would normally protest but were kept away because of “what they would see at the parade.”

The group of Mexican men was fenced off from the main parade at Fifth Avenue and 15th Street, and parade-goers repeatedly kissed in front of them.

Later in the day, a fight broke out between a parade-goer and an Orthodox man associated with the group.

“It’s been a lot of confrontation,” Freed told the Times. “Whenever you have emotions, you have a situation.”

A message from our CEO & publisher 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.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.