"My synagogue is home for all," Rabbi Moshe Ariel Abel told a session of the five-day Limmud conference in Birmingham.

"I don't care whether you're Jewish or not, whether you're transsexual or not - we'll look after you."

Rabbi Abel, of Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation, Princes Road, was addressing an audience on Transsex in the Synagogue.

He told of difficult halachic issues facing the transgender community in Jewry.

Rabbi Abel, who grew up in Broughton Park, Salford, said: "Halachic discussion has an inbuilt presumption that just because a person has a physical aspect to them that they must be that.

"And until that person has a fundamental change made to their private area basically, then they cannot be anything other than what that private part is.

"But it is the mind that determines their femininity or masculinity."

He said that transsexual people - "a person having a strong desire to assume the physical characteristics and gender role of the opposite sex" - was still a delicate issue within the Orthodox community.

He recalled: "I had a call before Yom Kippur asking if anyone was willing to take a transgender woman in for Kol Nidrei.

"I felt that my synagogue is home for all. Since childhood, she has been saying 'I am a girl', despite being born as a boy.

"And I will respect her wishes by referring to her as such (a woman). No one really listened to her.

"It's pain that people are suffering in that situation - they feel entirely as a woman, behave as a woman and as a modest one too.

"There is a supposition among the uneducated that if a person is homosexual or a transvestite that there is a promiscuity about their character. That is very untrue."

Rabbi Abel is adamant that community rabbis and parents must do a better job of dealing with transgender issues.

He said: "Parents disowning their children is all too common in the charedi camp, although it is not exclusive to their community.

"It happens in all walks of life. Too many wash their hands of their children and disown them and simply say, 'We will have nothing to do with this child any more'."

However, the Merseyside rabbi, who also serves the Southport Jewish community, said parents also needed the proper pastoral support in such situations.

"These parents need support, but it depends what the rabbi is like," he added. "Proper pastoral support is asking, 'How are you helping?' and 'How can I help you help your son or daughter?'.

"However, if their world view is so skewered then they are not going to do it."

Rabbi Abel admitted he is on the beginning of his own halachic journey to discover a better understanding of the issues facing the transgender community.

He explained how he refused to "hide away" the transgender woman in his community.

He continued: "There were issues such as bathroom use.

"We did not want people to come out of a bathroom shouting that a male has been in the female toilet, for example.

"Unisex toilets in this circumstance would be a much less pressured facility.

"I had to prepare my chairman so he knew how to answer questions that he would be asked.

"But I made it clear that we would not make an effort to tidy her away from the community."

Rabbi Abel also said that government papers had to cater better towards the transgender community and admitted that a tick box reading "Prefer not to say" for gender would be "difficult for a Jewish organisation to resign itself to".