A Las Cruces synagogue welcomes LGBTQ+ Jews to the Shabbat table
Each month on a Friday evening, a small but determined group gathers inside a converted adobe hall on the southern edge of Las Cruces. They come with wine, with challah, and sometimes with stories they have never before shared in a Jewish space. The dinner is Shabbat, but it is also something more deliberate. Temple Beth-El of Las Cruces opens its doors and its tables for a monthly gathering that places queer Jews, their families and their allies at the heart of the ritual.
The dinner is part of a wider turn across progressive Jewish congregations, where the synagogue is no longer assumed to be a uniform place. Organisers describe the meal as both a celebration and an act of repair, a way of saying that Jewish tradition belongs to every body and every identity.
Australia offers a useful reference point for reading this story. Same-sex marriage has been legal there since 2017, and cities such as Sydney and Melbourne host large Pride festivals, Mardi Gras in Sydney and Midsumma in Melbourne, that draw hundreds of thousands of people. Jewish congregations in Surry Hills, St Kilda and Caulfield have spent years learning how to welcome LGBTQ+ members without flinching from halachic questions. The New Mexico experiment fits into a pattern of communities in the English-speaking West rethinking who gets to lead a Seder, who gets to chant Torah, and who gets to sit at a Friday night table.
What follows is a look at how the dinner started, who keeps it running, how it shapes the wider community, what it shares with Australian Jewish life, and what other synagogues might learn from a small congregation in the desert Southwest.
How a desert Shabbat dinner began
The idea grew out of a single conversation between Rabbi Levi Hausman and a congregant who had returned to Las Cruces after years in San Francisco. The congregant had stopped attending synagogue after feeling uncomfortable in more traditional settings, and the rabbi wanted to know what would make Jewish community feel possible again. The answer, in the end, was something simple and almost old-fashioned: a hot meal after a Friday service.
Temple Beth-El is a small Reform congregation, one of only a handful of Jewish communities in the Mesilla Valley. Its sanctuary sits a few streets away from New Mexico State University, and many of its members are academics, retirees, and graduate students who arrived from somewhere else. That sense of transplant runs through the LGBTQ+ dinner too. Some attendees drove in from El Paso, others from Deming, and a handful log in by Zoom when weather closes the highways.
The first dinner drew nineteen people. A plate of chicken soup with matzah balls sat next to a vegan brisket, and the rabbi offered an opening blessing that named, without fanfare, every kind of household in the room. From that evening onward, the dinner has run on the second Friday of each month, advertised quietly through Instagram, WhatsApp groups, and good old-fashioned flyers at the local coffee shop.
Who keeps the dinner running
Running a queer-friendly Shabbat in a city of roughly 115,000 people is not a one-rabbi job. A rotating committee of about six volunteers plans menus, recruits speakers, and sets up tables the way a synagogue sisterhood might have done decades ago, only with a different sensibility baked in. A volunteer coordinator handles RSVPs and dietary needs, which range from kosher-keeping to gluten-free to strictly vegan.
The dinner deliberately mixes generations. High school students from the congregation's youth group sit beside retirees who came out late in life. A drag artist who performs in downtown El Paso once led the motzi, while a paediatrician from the local Veterans Affairs clinic read a psalm. Regulars say the variety is the point: a room where a trans man can say the blessing over candles without anyone turning around.
The community table is the most democratic space in the synagogue. Money is pooled for groceries, and nobody tracks who brought which dish. It is, in the organising committee's words, a working-class answer to a working-class question: how do you make Shabbat feel possible for people who have been pushed out of Jewish life, or who never felt welcome in it to begin with?
Beyond the dinner table
The LGBTQ+ Shabbat dinner is not a standalone event. It serves as a hub for other programming, including a monthly book club that has covered titles ranging from short story collections by queer Israeli writers to memoirs of growing up in Orthodox families. The synagogue also runs a small food pantry that serves the wider Las Cruces community, with queer members volunteering alongside straight allies.
The ripple effects are felt beyond the temple walls. A local Unitarian Universalist congregation sends members to the dinners as a sign of interfaith solidarity, and a Catholic priest from a neighbouring parish has attended twice. For an area of New Mexico where religious diversity includes large Catholic, Latter-day Saint, and Native American communities, a Jewish dinner that openly welcomes queer people is itself a kind of statement.
Younger members say the dinners have eased the path to other synagogue commitments. People who first arrived at a Shabbat dinner end up joining the board, helping with High Holiday services, or signing up for the congregation's adult b'nai mitzvah programme. Inclusivity, the data suggests, often starts at a shared table.
Echoes across the Pacific
The shape of the Las Cruces experiment resonates with Australian Jewish life, where progressive congregations have spent more than two decades wrestling with the same questions. In Melbourne's inner suburbs, synagogues in Caulfield and St Kilda work alongside organisations such as Aleph Melbourne, which supports LGBTQ+ Jews and has hosted its own Friday night gatherings for years. Sydney's Newtown, long associated with the broader queer community that fills Oxford Street during Mardi Gras, has produced Jewish events that blend pride and prayer in a single evening.
What the Australian experience offers is a timeline. Australian congregations normalised same-sex commitment ceremonies and later same-sex marriages well before legal recognition in 2017. Many synagogues now have formal inclusion policies, and rabbinical figures have publicly tied Jewish ethics to the welcome of queer members. By contrast, the Las Cruces dinner is younger, scrappier, and built almost entirely on volunteer time, but it is pointed in the same direction.
| Aspect | Las Cruces dinner | Australian counterpart |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Small Reform temple in the desert Southwest | Established congregations in Caulfield, St Kilda, Newtown |
| Core format | Monthly communal dinner after Friday services | Shabbat gatherings, book clubs, Pride events |
| Legal backdrop | No state-level civil unions ban, but rural pressure on queer people | Marriage equality since 2017 |
| Volunteer base | Mostly retirees and graduate students | Multigenerational, sometimes professional staff |
| Typical gathering | 25 to 40 attendees | 50 to 200 attendees |
| Shared element | Mix of religious ritual and informal conversation | Same |
Australian visitors who attend synagogue events often notice the use of the colloquial register, with rabbis and lay leaders slipping easily into "no worries" or "see you next arvo" without losing the rhythm of prayer. The Las Cruces dinner has something of that same informality, the sense that Judaism can be carried in a relaxed accent rather than a formal one. The willingness of either community to relax the formality around the table is part of what makes the gatherings feel safe.
What other synagogues can borrow
The clearest lesson from Las Cruces is also the most practical. Inclusion does not require a sizeable budget, a full-time inclusivity officer, or a town of a million people. It requires a Friday evening, a group of volunteers, and a rabbinic voice willing to say the quiet part out loud. Australian congregations that already do this well can see in the New Mexico dinner a model stripped down to its essentials, one that might travel to smaller towns that lack the infrastructure of Sydney or Melbourne.
A second lesson is rhythm. The dinner works because it returns every month, on the same day, at roughly the same time. Routine, in this context, is not boring but reassuring, especially for people whose lives have not always been predictable. A synagogue that wants to welcome LGBTQ+ members might begin with a single recurring event rather than a sweeping policy document.
A third lesson is honesty. The organisers in Las Cruces do not pretend the dinner solves every halachic question. They say openly that some questions remain, that some members disagree, and that the dinner is a starting point rather than a finished answer. That level of candour can be more persuasive than any statement, because it tells visitors exactly what kind of room they are walking into.
Across New Mexico and Australia alike, Jewish communities are working out the practical meaning of an old phrase: that every Jew should be able to find a place at the table. In Las Cruces, that place is set once a month with a plate of soup, a glass of wine, and a chair that no one is asked to give up. The offer is small in scale and large in spirit, and it has changed, quietly and steadily, what synagogue can feel like.