Sharon Kleinbaum was installed in 1992 as rabbi of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, considered the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the nation.
At the time, AIDS was killing thousands of gay New Yorkers each year. “The CBST community knows what it takes to live through a plague,” Kleinbaum says in a message posted on the synagogue’s website after New York became an epicenter of COVID-19.