80 members of SF gay synagogue dead of AIDS

From Jewish News of Northern California:

Mark Feldman had the world on a string.

He was young, gregarious and smart. As director of admissions at New College, his career was on the ascent. As a co-director of publicity for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, a largely gay and lesbian San Francisco synagogue, he was an emerging leader in the local Jewish and gay communities.

So synagogue colleagues were dumbstruck when Feldman announced at a board meeting he had come down with the “gay disease.”

The year was 1983. The term AIDS had not yet become widely known. And no one then fully understood what had descended so lethally on the gay community. But Feldman knew he was facing a grave illness, and when he succumbed a short time later at age 31, he became the first Sha’ar Zahav congregant to die of AIDS.

Sadly, he was not the last. The names of nearly 80 other congregants felled by the virus adorn the synagogue’s memorial wall today.

That's a relatively short excerpt from a long article.

Tags: Judaism, San Francisco, AIDS, California, Jews