The words “Death to LGBT” were found scrawled on a monument in Tel Aviv that commemorates members of the community who were persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity. Passersby discovered the graffiti on Thursday, October 25, 2018, at the monument in Meir Park where the LGBTQ community center is […]
Tour guide Alice Marcu works at the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, where she specializes in LGBTQ history. She tells the once neglected story of the persecutions of homosexuals during the Holocaust. A Wider Bridge is fortunate to have Alice as our tour guide during our Israel Missions. This is her story. I began at Yad […]
A Wider Bridge’s Laurel Grauer is on the host committee for the “Hidden Stories of Holocaust History” benefit event on November 2, 2017 in Chicago. We invite you to join us at this event. Oil on canvas by August Heitmuller entitled “A Pair of Friends (Freundespaar).” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Schwules Museum The “Hidden […]
Colorado-based writer Andrea Doray believes there are many parallels between pre-World War II in Germany and today’s situation in America: Neighbors turn on neighbors, because they supported a certain ideology. Eva Levine’s birthday – July 6 – always follows hard on our own American Independence Day. I commemorate Eva’s birthday, as I do every year, […]
In two days, Los Angeles and Washington DC are joining Tel Aviv’s efforts to “wake up” the international LGBTQ community and the world’s leaders to stop the persecution of gay men and transgender women in Chechnya. This Friday, May 5, and over the weekend, an emergency protest in various parts of the world calls to […]
Writer Georgia Kolias cannot ever ignore the fact that in the southernmost tip of Eastern Europe, 60 miles from the Caspian Sea, the Chechen Republic, or Chechnya, is replicating the process of elimination that was used on Jews in Germany. Kolias urges the LGBTQ community to turn anger, fear, grief into action, because action=life. I […]
Sasha, a gay Chechen man who managed to escape after 11 days inside one of Chechnya’s three gay concentration camps shared with Israeli National News details of the atrocities being committed under the international community’s nose. Sasha, a survivor of a Chechen concentration camp for gay men, revealed to Channel 2 News what is happening […]
The Aguda, Israel’s National LGBT Task Force, is leading what they hope to become an international event – demonstrating in front of Russia’s embassy in Tel Aviv, against the persecution of LGBT people that is reportedly happening in Chechnya. In 1964, the Council of Europe declared May 5 “Europe Day,” an annual celebration of peace […]
“Israel will not shut its eyes,” declares a new video produced as a response from the LGBT community in Israel to the horror that is taking place in Chechnya: “We will work vigorously until Israel declares itself as a country that absorbs refugees who are persecuted in Russia for their sexual orientation,” says one of […]
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin from Temple Solel of Hollywood Florida reminds us that what is happening in Chechnya is the first public round up of homosexuals since gay men were interned in the Nazi concentration camps. The matzah crumbs are still on the tablecloth on the dining room table. The leftover charoset still sits in […]