One of the first openly gay rabbis to be ordained in the United Kingdom has died. Rabbi Sheila Shulman of London’s gay and lesbian synagogue, Beit Klal Yisrael, died Oct. 25. She was 77.
Shulman applied to Leo Baeck College in London as a lesbian feminist in 1984 and was ordained in 1989. She was originally from Brooklyn, New York, but had lived in Britain for more than 30 years.
She and a group of friends founded Beit Klal Yisrael synagogue in 1990. An ardent activist for women’s rights, she recently said: “It seems like, in the past 20 years or so, there’s been somebody following me and other feminists around with wet brooms, wiping out all the footsteps behind us.”
“She was an inspirational teacher whose sharp intellect will be deeply missed,” Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris, principal of Leo Baeck College, told the Jewish Chronicle of London. “She brought more people into the rabbinate in the past 20 years than any other person.”
Rainbow Jews, a project that records and showcases Jewish LGBT history in the UK from the 1950s to today, called Shulman “a true pioneer.” — j. wire reports