This is the fourth report for my How Do You Jew? project on Jewish identity.
Lavi Soloway and his daughter
“You shall not wrong a stranger (ger) or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:20)
“It is an astonishing fact that the Bible has more laws dealing with the protection of the stranger than with any other law, including honoring God, observing the Sabbath, festivals, etc. Obviously, for the biblical legislator, concern for the stranger was considered a religious value of supreme importance.” (Dr. David Marcus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in a d’var Torah on parashat Mishpatim, February 21, 2009.)
It may not be so surprising then, that of all the mitzvot he learned while growing up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish home and attending Jewish day schools in his native Toronto, this particular biblical injunction seems to have made the most lasting impression on Lavi Soloway. But there’s actually more to it.
This stranger, the ger, is generally understood to be an immigrant. The modern Hebrew words for immigrant (mehager) and immigration (hagira) are derived from ger. But it has also come to mean, according to more liberal and broader interpretations, anyone who is traditionally considered “the other,” anyone who is “different.” Soloway himself, as an immigrant to the United States and a gay man, fits both definitions of the term. These two defining characteristics, as well as what he learned about his family’s immigrant roots through extensive genealogical investigation, have compelled him to dedicate his legal career and much of his personal time to fighting for the rights of immigrants and LGBT individuals in his adopted country. His passion for helping both these groups has led him to develop in his legal practice a unique expertise in issues affecting the unification of gay and lesbian binational couples and in handling sexual orientation and gender identity-based asylum claims.
"Seek Peace and Pursue It." Artwork inspired by warning signs on Hwy. 405 near San Diego.
“I grew up in a Jewish bubble,” says 43-year-old Soloway. At first, “I took a lot of comfort in knowing I had this world, this shtetl, ingrained in me.” But then by the time he was attending Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, he came to realize that there wasn’t a lot of leeway to march to one’s own beat, much tolerance for dissent, in the setting he had been so accustomed to. Once he finally reconciled himself to the fact that there could be no wife and wedding for him, as there would be for most of his contemporaries, he came out and severed most of his ties with former classmates and childhood friends. He felt he needed time and space to figure things out, a challenge given that he had to readjust his expectations for his life without any positive reference points or role models. Self-acceptance was easy, but figuring out how to deal with it was hard. “I was a choir boy at Shaarei Shomayim, so it’s been a long journey,” as Soloway puts it.
Lavi Soloway and his law partner, Noemi Masliah
As a partner in Masliah & Soloway and as a social and political activist, Solway has been indefatigable. “Our standing out in the freezing cold protesting on behalf of Soviet Jewry back in high school really affected me. To me, it was normal to protest.” This sense of confidence and comfort with speaking out has served him well as he helped found the organization that has become Immigration Equality, assisted with the drafting of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act (now a bill being included in deliberations on comprehensive immigration reform), and as he continues to fight for the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by which the federal government defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman and ensures that no state (or other political subdivision within the United States) needs to treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state. Soloway is especially troubled by what he sees as “the pernicious effect” of this law.
Soloway and his daughter with then-candidate Barack Obama
When he sees a soapbox, Soloway is quick to get on it. “When I see opportunities, I take them, ” leading him to blog about the issues, feed content to other blogs, post links to articles on social networking sites, accept invitations to speak in front of audiences, and campaign for political candidates (as he did for President Obama). And, you are also likely to spot him at immigrant and LGBT rights rallies, especially in Los Angeles, where he recently moved after having lived almost two decades in New York.
Although his abiding interest in immigration and the effect it has on families has influenced his public life, it has most profoundly influenced some of the choices he has made in his personal one. As the son of older parents, Soloway did not benefit from learning his family’s history from his grandparents. It was only after his grandfather (his longest living grandparent) died and his mother and father themselves were getting on in age and suffering from health problems, that he began reconstructing the past based on clues that his grandfather had left him. Soloway “got into geneaology obsessively” in the 1990’s, benefiting from the internet’s information watershed during that decade. He traveled to Europe in search of family-related sites, and was astounded to discover that one of his grandfather’s siblings had survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel, continuing a branch of the family that Soloway’s immediate family had never known existed. He visited his newly discovered relatives in Israel after he and his cousin Omer, also a genealogy enthusiast, discovered one another. “We were two people digging a tunnel from different ends of the earth.”
Soloway dancing with his mother, c. 1972.
Family was obviously important to Soloway, but for many years, he assumed that he, as a single gay man, would never be able to be a parent. “I always wanted to have children, but I was not sure how.” That began to change in the last decade as more and more gays and lesbians, both singles and couples, started raising children and new avenues toward parenthood began to open up. As close as Soloway was to his parents and his siblings, and as much as he identified with his family’s history, the fact that he and his brother and sister were adopted figured prominently in his thinking about his own plans for becoming a father. Having a child who was biologically related to him, who he would raise Jewishly, mattered deeply to him.
So, in the spring of 2007, a gestational surrogate gave birth to twin girls conceived from Soloway’s sperm and donor eggs. What makes this surrogacy story different from almost all others is that Soloway’s gestational surrogate was his own sister living in Toronto. “Nothing can be more funny than telling your parents that you are having a baby with you sister,” he joked. It turned out that his traditional parents, who observed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in regards to Soloway’s sexual orientation, were supportive of Soloway’s plan to become a parent.
Sadly, Soloway’s mother passed away before the twins were born, and one of the girls did not make it, dying in the NICU. The baby, who had been named for Soloway’s deceased mother, was buried together in the same grave with her grandmother (which was halakhically possible since Soloway’s mother’s unveiling had not yet taken place).
Soloway, his husband and daughter. Photo by Marc Wolinsky.
As Soloway struggled with the competing emotions of joy of a new parent and sorrow of a mourning father and son, another life-changing opportunity presented itself. Several months after he buried one of his daughters, Soloway met the Jewish man who would become his husband and another father to his surviving little girl. Once again, something he at one time thought he would never be able to enjoy, building a Jewish home with a life partner, became possible. Last year he and his husband, an independent film producer, married in a ceremony in Toronto. Together they are raising their daughter in a home that is culturally and ethnically, if not particularly religiously, Jewish. In order to be “a whole person,” Soloway has sought a brand of Judaism that pitches a wider tent than the one he grew up in. The family attends services at Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, and their daughter goes to a Jewish preschool.
Soloway sees “an absolute connection” between his Jewishness and his family’s immigrant legacy and the choices he has made in his personal and professional lives, in particular his work on behalf of asylum seekers. “My grandparents left a place where they had no future because they were Jewish…When I stood in that forest where my grandparents’ family was gunned down by the Nazis on August 23, 1941, I decided that in my everyday life I would help people not end up in that forest.”
“That is where my energy comes from,” explains Soloway. ”I feel so privileged to be here. Not everyone had that opportunity.”
© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.
