A Gay Orthodox Jew Comes Home | Ely Winkler of Eshel makes a complicated, heartfelt return to the community of his childhood.

The idea that time is not a flat circle but a spiral is easy to see during Rosh Hashanah, the chaggim that follow it, and the other holidays on the Jewish calendar.

If we’re lucky — and yes, not all of us are — we gather with family or friends, every year, to celebrate the year’s joys and, particularly this year, to mark its horrors.

It’s never the same from one year to the next. It can’t be. We’re all, by definition, one year older. There might be new babies. There might be new partners. There might be empty chairs. The food’s the same, but the people eating it are the same but different.

So what does this have to do with Ely Winkler?

Mr. Winkler, who was born in 1987, grew up in Fort Lee. He’s the youngest child of Rabbi Neil Winkler, who led the Young Israel of Fort Lee from 1978 until exactly a decade ago, when he and his wife, Andrea — Ely’s mother, and a community stalwart — made aliyah.

Mr. Winkler had a typical Bergen County Orthodox childhood and adolescence. He went to the Moriah School in Englewood, then to the Torah Academy of Bergen County in Teaneck, followed by a gap year at Yeshivat Torat Shraga in Jerusalem and then Yeshiva University, where he majored in psychology.

“But after I left YU, I struggled to find my place in the Orthodox world,” Mr. Winkler said.

Why? Because he’s gay.

Read the full article in the Jewish Standard