Noa Sattath was exhausted.
After spending months planning the first gay pride parade in Jerusalem, she just wanted it to be over.
She carried some boxes of supplies into the street, and when she saw the pride flags hanging ready for the event, she started crying.
"I cried because I couldn't believe it," she said. "We had pride flags in Jerusalem."
Having a pride parade in Jerusalem was miraculous, she said, and something no one ever believed would happen. In the middle of a wave of terrorist attacks, there was still a huge attendance, she said.
"I think it expresses the desire of people in Jerusalem to celebrate diversity and to celebrate pluralism to go out in the streets and have a different message other than fear and hate," she said. "Every time we go into the streets, the city changes."
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Sattath chairs the Jerusalem Open House, a grassroots organization run out of an apartment that tries to create a safe space for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. The group is working to bring the World Pride Parade to the city in 2005, and Sattath is on tour to drum up interest. She spoke at UNM's Hillel House on Monday.
The group was established five years ago, and Sattath said the community is young and looking to define itself politically and culturally.
The organization is the first of its kind in Jerusalem and has a difficult mission, Sattath said, in serving equally Orthodox Jews, secular Jews and Palestinians. These communities are very segregated, she said.
"Every aspect of our work is affected by the fact that we serve these different communities," she said. "We invest a lot of time in creating a safe space for Palestinians and people who have settled in and around Jerusalem."
The Open House is the only organization in the world that offers services in Arabic for the gay community.
Sattath said it is very difficult for people to come out in the Palestinian community, and there are rumors of people being executed or tortured after they do. Jewish religion deals with homosexuality less often than Christianity, though not necessarily better, she said.
"The stronger our community gets, the stronger the resistance to it becomes," she said. "That's how social change works."
She said when the group first got together to establish its role in the community, organizers underestimated how many Orthodox Jews would need its services.
"We didn't expect that there would be this huge wave," Sattath said. "It kind of makes sense because the Orthodox people would not be able to fit in at a bar."
The Open House arranges for groups of the same background to meet and pulls together larger events for all its members.
"The secret to our success is our determination that we are one community, even though we have conflicts, and sometimes they seem impossible to solve," she said. "I know that we will solve it because there's no other choice."
