WASHINGTON — The leader of one of the Washington region’s most prominent synagogues has come out as gay, telling his thousands of congregants in a brutally personal email that a lifelong effort to deny his sexuality was over and that he and wife of 20 years would be divorcing.

“With much pain and tears, together with my beloved wife, I have come to understand that I could walk my path with the greatest strength, with the greatest peace in my heart, with the greatest healing and wholeness, when I finally acknowledged that I am a gay man,” Rabbi Gil Steinlauf wrote to members of Adas Israel Congregation in Northwest Washington on Monday.

In the six years since Steinlauf came to Adas, he has pumped energy into the large, 146-year-old synagogue with efforts aimed at both more traditional and progressive Jews. He made news in 2012 when he officiated at the first same-sex wedding at Adas Israel.

“Love is queer,” Steinlauf wrote last year in a piece called “The Queerness of Love: A Jewish Case for Same-Sex Marriage.” “We Jews are a people who never quite fit into the same categories” as others.

But only Monday did the father of three teenagers reveal how closely he identifies with the notion of not fitting in.

“Any scholar whose inside does not match his outside is no scholar,” the rabbi wrote Monday, quoting the Talmud. “Ultimately the dissonance between my inside and my outside became undeniable, then unwise, and finally intolerable.”

In his letter to the congregation of 1,420 households, and then in an interview, Steinlauf described an incredibly close relationship with his wife, whom he met in rabbinical school. The pair, he told The Washington Post, spent the past three years “desperately looking at one another, thinking, how can we hold onto this marriage, because we love one another so much?” And concluding that a reality he’d walled off since he was a boy wasn’t going away.

“What we’ve had for 20 years is very real, and the last thing I’d want is for us to live a lie,” he said.

His wife, Rabbi Batya Steinlauf, leads social justice and interfaith efforts for the Jewish Community Relations Council, the regional Jewish community’s main advocacy arm.