In 1st for Conservative movement, women rabbis tie knot in same-sex wedding

JTA — You could call it bashert: 15 years after a landmark decision in Judaism’s Conservative movement that paved the way for gay and lesbian students to enter its rabbinical schools and for rabbis to perform same-sex weddings, it would seem like destiny that two Conservative rabbis would wed.

Of course, it happened at Camp Ramah.

Rabbi Ariella Rosen and Rabbi Becca Walker tied the knot at the Conservative movement’s camp in Palmer, Massachusetts, last month, with yet another queer woman rabbi, Megan GoldMarche, officiating. Rosen’s father, Rabbi Jim Rosen, also played a role.

“It feels like we shouldn’t be groundbreaking,” Walker told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And yet she and Rosen made history as the first-ever same-sex marriage between two Conservative rabbis, according to Rabbi Ashira Konigsburg, the chief operating officer of the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, who said the organization was not aware of any others.

The Conservative movement adopted legal rulings designed to make gay and lesbian Jews “feel accepted and welcomed” in its synagogues and communities. The next year, its two US rabbinical schools admitted their first gay students. And in 2012, the movement issued guidelines for the first time for same-sex weddings, although many rabbis had been performing them already. READ MORE