Oh, well so much for Canadian claims of tolerance towards the GLBT population.

I must admit I was really surprised to read this…

Canadian rabbis expressed sadness after last week’s announcement by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) – the Conservative movement’s flagship institution in New York – that it will accept openly gay and lesbian students to its rabbinical and cantorial schools.

“I feel that this is an abandonment of traditional Judaism, and as such I can have no part of it,” said Rabbi Wayne Allen, spiritual leader of Toronto’s Beth Tikvah Synagogue and president of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Ontario region, the movement’s rabbinic organization.

The move “calls into question what it is that the Conservative movement really stands for and how it defines itself and in what significant way is the movement ideologically different from our Reform colleagues,” said Rabbi Steven Saltzman, spiritual leader of Adath Israel Congregation.

“It seems we have abandoned an important niche which used to act as the bridge between Orthodox and Reform. With Reform moving to the right and Orthodoxy moving to the right, our moving to the left seems to leave a huge gap, a chasm.”

You can read the rest here!

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