Eshel’s retreat for parents of LGBTQ kids gives support, builds community
Community is where you build it.
It’s where you find a home. Where you can talk about the things that really matter to you. Not all the time, of course; you can also laugh and tell stories and hand around your phone with the approximately 20,000 baby pictures on it. But at its core, a community is someplace where you feel free to be known.
And you can belong to more than one community, where you can divulge different aspects of yourself.
The Orthodox parents of LGBTQ children have communities back home, where they can feel loved and held and seen most of the time. But often there’s one aspect of their lives that they feel constrained about discussing. Their lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender children. Their queer kids.
So once a year, these parents go to the retreat that Eshel has established for them. According to its website, eshelonline.org, the organization sees building LGBTQ+ communities as its mission and working toward a world where LGBTQ+ people and their families are full participants in the Orthodox community of their choice as its vision.