Briefly

Briefly

Reform rabbis install first openly gay president, Denise Eger The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical arm of the Reform movement, has installed its first openly gay president, Rabbi Denise Eger. Eger, 55, was inaugurated on Monday morning at the CCAR’s annual convention in Philadelphia. She succeeds Rich-ard Block. The founding rabbi of the Kol Ami synagogue in Los Angeles, Eger has been on the CCAR board of trustees for four years. She was ordained in 1988. Eger came out in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1990. She is engaged to be married. She also was the first female and openly gay president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis and the founding president of the Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual Interfaith Clergy Association. Eger officiated at the first legal wedding in California for a lesbian couple, the Philadelphia Daily News reported. Monday’s inauguration was scheduled to be followed by a session celebrating the 25th anniversary of CCAR’s Resolution on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate, which called for the ordination of gay rabbis. Anti-Semitic graffiti discovered at Manhattan’s John Jay College Swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs were discovered drawn on the campus of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. The hate messages discovered last week also included racist and homophobic messages, WCBS-TV in New York reported. The college’s vice president, Lynette Cook-Francis, met with representatives of the groups that were targeted in the hate messages, according to a letter written to the campus community by John Jay’s president, Jeremy Travis, WCBS reported. “We should all be concerned and offended by these incidents,” Travis wrote. “We pride ourselves as being a community that celebrates diversity and values differences. We aspire to treat one another with respect and dignity.” College officials also reportedly met with the New York Police Department’s hate crimes unit. The John Jay Hillel in an email to the administration called the college’s response to the incident “inadequate,” The Algemeiner reported, and complained that the campus security handled the first discovery of a swastika internally without notifying the campus administration or faculty. The Hillel also called for more uniformed and plainclothes security patrols near its offices, according to The Algemeiner.

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