by Alan Zeitlin for Jewish Journal
“My grandfather led his congregation into the gas chamber,” Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie says in “Sabbath Queen,” a new documentary about Lau-Lavie’s life. “A rabbi doesn’t leave his congregation.”
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau died with his people in Treblinka. In the film, Lau says he would see a picture of his grandfather and when he thought of this image, he thought of God. Lau’s father, Naphtali Lau-Lavie, and his uncle, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, survived the Holocaust and were in Buchenwald when American troops liberated the camp. In the documentary he says his father may have been a spy, while his uncle was Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi from 1993 to 2003.
The son of a family of Orthodox rabbis was torn between accepting his ancestral destiny or becoming a drag queen rebel, Lau-Lavie, a gay man who was outed by an Israeli newspaper in his early 20s, says that his Torah portion included the verse from Leviticus that if a man lay with a man as he would with a woman, it would merit the death penalty.
He moved to New York and co-founded Lab/Shul, described as an “artist-driven, pop-up experimental congregation that was “God optional.” It was there he developed his bombastic drag alter-ego of Hadassah Gross, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz. He originally became Hadassah only on Purim, and then more often.
What inspired the character? “The answer is Purim and the answer is vodka,” Lau-Lavie told The Journal. “She came down with a name and an accent and story that kept evolving. Call it creativity or mystical channeling. I don’t know. I would watch after and be amazed by the wisdom of what she said.”
Although his father doubted Lau-Lavie would become a rabbi, to he surprised of many, he decided to learn at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and become ordained.
He chose JTS because “I really respect and still hold onto the Conservative approach to halacha and it is a positive historical approach,” he told The Journal. “Halacha has an important voice in shaping our lives. I think halacha must be continued and it must be evolved. The 2006 choice of the Conservative movement to ordain gay/lesbian students was done after a decade of very careful consideration and back and forth debates. I respected both the process and the decision. The way it was done convinced me it was the movement I could get behind, since I was no longer fully Orthodox but don’t believe halacha needs to be put aside for the sake of modernity.”
Lau-Lavie said he had a great working relationship with director Sandi DuBowski. There were times he wished the cameras were turned off, such as his father’s funeral or when his partner died. A big conflict was his desire to break the law and officiate at an intermarriage of two men who are Buddhist leaders, with one being Jewish. Doing so meant he would resign from the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, as Conservative rabbis cannot perform intermarriages.
