WARSAW, Poland — When Rabbi Aaron Katz walks the streets of the former Jewish quarter, scenes of that lost world fill his imagination: Families headed to synagogue, women cooking Sabbath meals, his father as a boy with the side curls of an Orthodox Jew.
But Katz’s life could hardly be more different from that prewar culture, at least in one key respect: He is Poland’s first openly gay rabbi.
Born in Argentina 53 years ago to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust, Katz is the latest rabbi to play his part in reviving a once vibrant Jewish community that was all but wiped out by Hitler.
He settled into Warsaw’s historic Jewish district in March with Kevin Gleason, a former Hollywood producer on such reality TV shows as “The Bachelor” and “Nanny 911,” with whom he entered into a registered domestic partnership in Los Angeles two years ago.
They live only three streets from the birth home of Katz’s father in a modern and spacious apartment with their dogs, two gentle brown boxers. Katz said he is moved by the links to his past but keeps his focus on the future.
“I don’t think we will come back to this great Jewish life,” he said, referring to prewar Poland, a country where one person in 10 was Jewish and where synagogues, yeshivas and shtetls defined the landscape. “But I hope we will have a normal Jewish life in Poland.”
Katz is an anomaly in conservative Poland, where to be either Jewish or gay is challenge enough, at least outside cities.
Katz is the second rabbi to serve Beit Warszawa, a Reform community with 250 members that was founded 10 years ago by Polish and American Jews who felt little affinity with some Orthodox practices, such as separating men and women during services. The Reform movement ordains gay rabbis.
Katz, a citizen of Argentina, Israel and Sweden, said he has not faced anti-Semitism or homophobia in Poland. But some people, speaking in private, reveal a degree of discomfort.
One woman at a Sabbath service admitted finding Katz’s open sexuality too “aggressive.”
Others, though, seem comfortable, as evidenced by dinners where Jews and non-Jews joined Katz and his partner at their home for goulash or chicken-and-potato meals.
“I think the rabbi’s home should be open,” Katz said. “The moment that you take a position, your family takes the position too. It’s a role.”
