Michael Levine, a founding member of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s influential LGBTQ+ synagogue, died on Tuesday at age 81.
Levine, who bore witness to the Stonewall riots — a series of demonstrations following a police raid at a downtown gay bar in 1969, an event that galvanized the gay rights movement — was an urban planner who helped transform Soho into the residential neighborhood that it is today.
Friends and family speaking at his memorial service Thursday morning — which was simulcast from Beit Simchat Torah in Midtown and from Santa Maria, the Philippines, where he and his husband moved last summer to be with extended family — recalled his fondness for ocean cruises and gambling. In fact, Levine would regularly organize blackjack games at his Greenwich Village apartment after Friday night services at Beit Simchat Torah, where he became a member in 1974.
Levine is survived by his husband of 34 years, Reynaldo Nacianceno, a nurse.
Levine was born in May 1943 to Dora and Julius Levine. He and his older brother, Sheldon, grew up in a Modern Orthodox family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn “before the Lubavitch rebbe arrived,” he recounted in an oral history for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network in 2021.
A double graduate of CUNY’s Hunter College, with a bachelor’s degree in political science and sociology and a master’s degree in urban planning, Levine called his work shaping downtown Manhattan — specifically helping to designate Soho as a joint living/work district for artists — “the highlight” of his career in an interview with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
On the evening of Friday, June 28, 1969, Levine was at the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village, with a date he had met the week before. Suddenly, the lights came on — police were raiding the bar. Instead of quietly dispersing or cooperating with police arrests, patrons began to fight back. Crowds formed and sporadic violence continued for several more nights.
The events inspired activism around the country on behalf of gay people, and led to the formation of dozens of groups seeking political equality and social acceptance. It was also a formative moment in Levine’s life.
A city employee at the time, the only thought on Levine’s mind was, “what happens if someone finds out that I’m gay?” he recalled, as he had not come out to his friends and family.
“In the week that followed, I got phone calls from relatives, cousins, my brother, my aunt,” he told StoryCorps in 2010. “‘We’re just going to find out if you’re OK. We know you go to places like this. We want to make sure you’re alright.’ That means they knew all along. It’s like I was wearing a sign on my back. They knew. We never discussed it. I never once had to say to anyone in my family, ‘I’m gay.’
“I was the same me,” he added. “I was a homosexual person, coming from an old-fashioned Jewish neighborhood, living in Greenwich Village on my own. I felt the same. I felt comfortable. But I felt the world now is more comfortable with me. And Stonewall did that for me.”
A few years later, Levine first attended CBST for Yom Kippur services in 1974 to say the Yizkor memorial prayer for his parents. He was “astonished,” according to a New York Jewish Week article in 2011, when, after years meeting in a church annex, the synagogue purchased its own dedicated space at 130 W. 30th St. “I was unbelievably touched to see a traditional Jewish service at a gay synagogue that reminded me of my Jewish childhood in Brooklyn,” he said.
The synagogue — the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the world — helped pave the way for the inclusion of queer Jews in ritual life in New York City, and eventually, across the country. In 1978, Levine became the synagogue’s president, serving for three years. He served in various other roles at CBST, including as secretary, board chair and parliamentarian; he was also president of the World Congress of GLBT Jews.
“I’m here to make sure there will always be a Jewish people,” Levine said. “So being alive is about the survival of the Jewish people.”
That commitment was perhaps best exemplified by his love for his family, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, rabbi emerita of CBST, said at Thursday’s service.
“He was a great example of a ‘guncle’ — of the gay uncle who understood his role in the next generation’s life to be deeper than just a distant relative,” Kleinbaum said, detailing his close relationship with his nieces and nephews, including niece Jodi, a former crafts editor for Martha Stewart Living, who also spoke of how Levine’s eye for design and table settings inspired her work.
Levine’s loss will be felt immensely, mourners said.
“Each year on Shavuot, Michael would help each person carry a scroll to receive Torah — many for the first time — in honor of so many who were told it wasn’t for them to touch because they were gay, or a woman, or not worthy,” Rachel Weiss, a rabbi at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois, who knew Levine when she was an intern at CBST, shared in the live stream. “He gently and firmly and with great presence and detail instructed how to hold a Torah and why to claim that privilege. Here, too, we give everyone the chance to hold the Torah and claim that inheritance. Now, too, I will do that in his memory.”
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