Ruth Berman
Born in Brooklyn, Ruthie Berman earned?koved?as a pioneer, a prominent educator, and longtime LGBTQ activist with life-long partner and fellow activist and Brooklyn native, Connie Kurtz, until Connie’s death in 2018.
Ruthie and Connie lived in Sheepshead Bay’s Contello Towers in the late 1950s with their husbands and children. Their friendship formed over their love for grassroots politics until, after 16 years, they realized that they were in love. Bravely bucking the conventional mores of the time, they divorced their husbands and embarked on a life-long relationship. After 37 years together, they married in NYC in July 2011, only 2 days after gay marriage became legal in the state. [expand title="Read More"] Together, Ruthie and Connie became an indestructible force in the LGBTQ community. For 44 years they were inseparable, so much as that you never heard the name “Ruthie” without “and Connie” attached, and vice versa.
While Ruthie was a guidance counselor at a Brooklyn high school in the 1980s, she and Connie successfully sued the New York City Board of Education along with two other couples, to gain domestic partner benefits, establishing a vital precedent which eventually extended health benefits to all domestic partners in New York City in 1994.
In 2002 they were the stars of the award-winning documentary film "Ruthie and Connie: Every Room In The House," that celebrated their landmark struggle for equal rights and garnered many film awards worldwide including 10 Best Film and Audience Awards. The film was directed by Brooklyn’s own three-time Academy Award nominee Deborah Dickson and photographed by 2018 BJHOF inductee Ferne Pearlstein.
As?prominent advocates?for LGBTQ rights, Ruthie and Connie formed or were part of numerous organizations in New York and Florida fighting justice and equal rights for that community. In 2016, when Ruthie and Connie received an award from the advocacy group SAGE, the Miami Herald called them “perhaps the nation’s best-known senior lesbian couple.” Among the many honors and accolades they have received from around the world including from public?officials of New York City and State, various national organizations, and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a bill in Congress was proposed in their name: The Ruthie and Connie LGBT Elders Law, which will be added to the federal Elders Law that has been in place since 1965.
Between them, Ruthie and Connie have 20 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren and counting.
In their documentary, Connie tried to explain the leap that she and Ruthie took back in the 1970s. “Why the hell would we go and make such a tremendous change in our lives, and certainly in the lives of those that we loved?” she said. “It wasn’t going from bad to something good. What we went for ? what I went for ? was completion.”[/expand]
Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses
Dianne Cohler-Esses is the first woman from the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn to become a rabbi, ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 1995. She currently serves as Scholar in Residence at UJA Federation in New York. After graduating, she received a year-long fellowship to study with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and to teach and design curriculum at CLAL, the Center for Leadership and Learning. [expand title="Read More"]Subsequently she did advanced academic work in Midrash at the JTS and served as educational director for Mishpacha, an online education and support program for alienated Jewish families across America. She was director of a feminist retreat for Ma’yan: The Jewish Women’s Project of the JCC in Manhattan and on the faculty for the Hebrew Union College Kollel, the JTS Hevrutah program, the Skirball Institute and the Bronfman Youth Fellowship. From 1998 until 2002, she was the co-director of the Bronfman Youth Fellowship and subsequently served as their senior educator until the summer of 2005.[/expand]