Gay Israeli Teen Kidnapped by Family
With all the buzz about how hot Tel Aviv’s become for gay travelers, we still get the occasional reminder that not everyone’s on board with circuit parties, muscle boys and beach cruising.
Take the family of a 19-year-old gay man living in Tel Aviv. Four people from his hometown of Tamra, an Arab enclave in Israel’s north, are accused of “kidnapping their homosexual relative and taking him on a 12-hour nightmare, all because of his sexual tendencies,” according to an article on Ynetnews.com.
The British gay site PinkNews, reported that the man, known as “Angel,” had migrated to Tel Aviv “in the hope of leading a more open and safer life.” But according to his police complaint, relatives “continued to persecute him after his move, repeatedly demanding he return to his hometown and ‘act like a normal person.’”
Chief Superintendent Miri Peled of the Tel Aviv Police told Ynetnews that “This is a serious incident of kidnapping a person over his lifestyle… The family found it difficult to accept the man’s lifestyle and wanted to push him away by threatening and beating him.” JSSNews, a French Jewish site, went further, reporting Angel had been “tortured and molested.”
On Monday, PinkNews reported, four of Angel’s relatives reportedly arrived at his home in Tel Aviv and waited for him armed with pepper spray. “When he arrived home accompanied by two friends, his relatives sprayed and assaulted them before grabbing Angel and escaping. His friends notified police immediately.”
Angel was beaten and threatened before police located and arrested his assailants.
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
