A Rabbi’s Fierce Compassion

In the lobby of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), where Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum ’81 served as senior rabbi for over three decades, four large gay pride flags are mounted on the wall. Visible from street level, they convey to any person passing by that the synagogue is a space welcome to all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or background. It is a tenet that has always been at the core of Kleinbaum’s work.

Traces of Kleinbaum’s legacy and impact can be found in every corner of the temple. In a lower-level bathroom — complete with floor-to-ceiling, rainbow-colored stall doors — there is a wall featuring newspaper clippings and photographs of Kleinbaum and CBST members participating in marches and peaceful protests advocating for gay rights. 

The bathroom, which was the first in New York City to receive a variance to include all genders, offers a snapshot of how Kleinbaum led the world’s largest LGBTQ+ synagogue — a tenure guided by compassion and the pursuit of social justice and inclusivity. 

Though Kleinbaum, now 65, retired from her position at CBST last July, her influence continues to be celebrated and well documented. On CBST’s website, her appointment is called “the turning point” in the congregation’s history: “The arrival of Rabbi Kleinbaum — lesbian, social activist, ardent Yiddishist and devoted Torah student — marked the beginning of an ‎epoch at CBST.” 

While at the helm, Kleinbaum transformed a congregation — which originated with 12 men worshipping in a church classroom — into a space where people could be both Jewish and gay. Under her leadership, CBST’s annual budget grew from $40,000 to $3.3 million, with programming for kids and teens, help for asylum seekers, internships for rabbinical and cantorial students, and Talmud studies. Kleinbaum initiated the Ark Immigration Clinic, which trains volunteers and attorneys to assist asylum seekers. (Many of the clients are LGBTQ+.) The synagogue also has its own music director, grand piano, and mellifluous chorus.

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Her Early Path

Kleinbaum, who was born and raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, developed an interest in social justice early in life. The first sign of her activism emerged in the fifth grade when she organized a protest to allow girls to wear pants at school. She won. 

Kleinbaum arrived at Barnard in 1977 and chose to major in political science, with Yiddish as her foreign language requirement. She says her passion for social justice, Judaism, and LGBTQ+ rights was firmly rooted in what she learned as a political science major at Barnard.

“I had an incredible experience at Barnard,” Kleinbaum says from the Inwood apartment she shares with her wife, Randi Weingarten, who is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Gracie, their rescue pup named after author and activist Grace Paley. “Barnard has a reputation for being an intellectually exciting place, a place for the arts and the place for political activism and theatre and all the things that I loved.”

Her commitment to social justice led her to professor Dennis Dalton (who retired in 2008). “I took every course he taught,” she says, including Political Theory and Colloquium on Nonviolence. “He was my senior advisor and my mentor, and he was so central to my intellectual growth, my pacifism, and my pursuit of nonviolence in deep, deep ways, which remains a really important part of my spiritual life,” Kleinbaum says. 

Kleinbaum served as the assistant director of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, and then went on to receive her rabbinical ordination from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, the only seminary that ordained women and gay people at that time. After becoming a rabbi, she served as the director of congregational relations of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., before joining Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in 1992.

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Building a Congregation

CBST’s first meeting was in a church in 1973, after Jacob Gubbay, a Jewish man from India, noticed a small ad for a gay ‎Passover seder at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea. He led the seder, and soon after, he established Friday night services in the church and placed an ad in the Village Voice promoting them. Gradually, more and more people joined, and by 1975, there were 100 people attending Friday night services and services for the High Holy Days. Around this time, the members officially became the Congregation ‎Beit Simchat Torah. 

When Kleinbaum became rabbi in 1992, the congregation had made its home at Westbeth, an artists community in the West Village, for almost 15 years. 

Within a month of her arrival, Kleinbaum, then 33, was managing the grief of congregants dying of AIDS against a troubling landscape of ignorance, hostility, and fear around the disease. Kleinbaum officiated three or four funerals a month, holding hands, listening to men who were valiantly pushing back against a disease that would take their lives while counseling family members who hadn’t known that their sons and brothers were gay until the very end of their lives. 

She sat with men in hospital rooms so that they weren’t alone. When her phone rang, she listened with empathy to those struggling. Sometimes, she cried. “Sadness doesn’t stop me from being present,” Kleinbaum says. 

Forty percent of CBST’s congregation was lost to AIDS between 1981 and 1997. 

“I was hopefully bringing some level of dignity and honor to their lives, even if it was at the end of their lives, and that gave me a great feeling of being useful,” she says.

A Move to Midtown

The synagogue moved farther north, to midtown Manhattan. In 2016, CBST completed the transformation of  its new home, combining two street-level stores that once sold handbags and furs. In the sanctuary, a wall of remembrance honors those who lost their lives to AIDS.

The same deliberate attention to inclusivity carries through to the smallest details of the synagogue.

Kleinbaum purchased mezuzahs cast from the impressions left by mezuzahs formerly affixed to the door frames of Jewish homes in Poland in remembrance of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Mezuzahs were also placed at a lower level for children and wheelchair users so they could touch them and take part in the daily ritual.

A carving of male and female lions above the door to the Wine Family Sanctuary puts the lions of Judah in a more contemporary context. But perhaps most poignant is a single cushioned light-blue chair in the balcony. When CBST was located in Westbeth, congregants sat in metal folding chairs, which was painful for some of the more frail men. A congregant who eventually died of AIDS left money in his will for padded chairs. 

Kleinbaum’s vision of peace and diplomacy extends to bagels. “The Kleinbaum Shmear Rule,” printed on a wooden plaque mounted in the community room, instructs that “when taking a bagel at the oneg [the meal after Shabbat services], do not pause to shmear the bagel while still in line, lest those waiting be made to wait longer, increasing their hunger and their ire on a holy day. Rather, take the shmear and put it on one side of the plate, and shmear the bagel once seated, for the sake of the ways of peace.”

The Privilege of Time

In July 2024, Kleinbaum stepped down from her role at CBST after 32 years. (The plaque remains.)

“I felt that spiritually it was a good time to turn this leadership position over to somebody younger and to make sure that I don’t stay too long,” she says. “And I’m also looking forward to different work that I’ll be doing that’s not running a big organization or synagogue.”

At the moment, she’s sorting out speaking requests, mulling over writing a book, and teaching at NYC’s Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Boston.

“I have this incredible privilege of now having time,” she says, “and I’m not limited by the political limitations of being a congregational rabbi.”

Kleinbaum plans on visiting her daughters and granddaughters in California and traveling with Weingarten. “We got together in our 50s,” Kleinbaum says, “which was a blessing, and we tolerate each other’s foibles.”

While she’s plotting her next move, Kleinbaum gathers up Gracie for her morning walk around the neighborhood. 

“[Singer and activist] Pete Seeger once said he couldn’t do demonstrations anymore, but what he could do is pick up litter, and that’s what he did, and that’s what I do in this neighborhood all the time,” she says, after putting Gracie on her leash and adding two plastic bags to her pocket. “I always bring a bag with me and pick up garbage. Everyone can start out small.”