Horrified by the deadly shooting at a Tel Aviv gay and lesbian center in August, Robert Goldstein felt compelled to do something.
A Jew helping his fellow Jews?
Don’t be fooled by his name. Goldstein serves as pastor of St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco. His church recently donated $2,000 to the Jerusalem Open House, one of Israel’s leading LGBT organizations. He says a similar donation to the Israel Gay Youth Organization, the target of the attack, will follow.
The impetus for the gifts came after Goldstein, 65, and some of his congregants visited Israel on a 2008 tour sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council. While there, the group visited both the Open House and the IGY, and came away impressed.
Then they heard about the killing on Aug. 1, when an unknown masked gunman entered the IGY center, shot two dead and wounded many others.
“Because of St. Francis Church’s interest in sexual minority rights and promoting them, I was very interested in the LGBT community in Israel,” Goldstein says. “All of us on the tour were just appalled and grief-stricken when we heard about the attack on the Tel Aviv center.”
St. Francis Lutheran is one of San Francisco’s most progressive mainline Protestant churches when it comes to LGBT issues.
In 1996, St. Francis was expelled from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America — the governing body of the denomination — because it ordained three gay and lesbian seminary graduates who had refused to pledge lifelong sexual abstinence.
St. Francis Church’s creed holds that gays and lesbians do not commit a sin by practicing gay sex.
That was sin enough in the eyes of the ELCA to have the church kicked out of the organization. But Goldstein, who came to St. Francis in 2005, says things are changing in the Lutheran world.
“This summer the national church voted to permit gay married clergy, and also work toward rights for gay marriage,” he says. “In a sense [St. Francis Church] never spiritually left the ELCA, and [congregants] are now in dialogue among themselves about coming home.”
Though a lifelong Christian and an ordained minister for decades, Goldstein indeed has a Jewish past.
A native of Melbourne, Australia, Goldstein had a Jewish father and Irish Protestant mother, while his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather lived in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter in pre-state Israel.
Goldstein, however, grew up in the Episcopal Church, but remembers a traumatic event at age 8 that shaped his future as much as anything else.
“I read about the Holocaust,” Goldstein recalls. “I was absolutely traumatized by it. It never left me, for a long, long time. The Holocaust trauma gave me a keen sense of suffering of people, and that helped me go into ministry.”
Goldstein came to America at age 18 with, as he puts it, “a lot of chutzpah but not a lot of sense.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in biblical languages, two master’s degrees in divinity from Yale University and a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary.
He later served as a pastor in New Jersey and Chicago, where he partnered with the American Jewish Committee to begin the process of repudiating Martin Luther’s notorious attacks on Jews. In 1993 the full Lutheran Church picked up the mantle and issued an apology to the Jewish community.
Goldstein says much of his impetus to improve Christian-Jewish relations stems from his Jewish roots.
He recalls a moment during his first visit to Israel in 1993. Visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, he laid a wreath by the eternal flame.
“After I placed it with full composure, I broke down in deep crying,” he says. “It was a kind of healing from reading about [the Holocaust], as a kid, all that terror.”
As for his more recent gesture toward Israel and its LGBT community, Goldstein hopes it, too, will promote healing.
“We hope that these gifts from San Francisco, small as they are, are tokens of love,” he says, “in the building of reconciliation between Christians and Jews.”