 advertisement that was basically sponsored by the name Jews for Judaism. Jews for Judaism is a new name in Toronto, but it's a rather older name in the United States. It represents an organization whose mission, you might say, is to combat the efforts of missionaries in North America. Currently, Jews for Judaism is represented by offices in Los Angeles, Baltimore, New York, Harrisburg, Detroit, and now Toronto. New Jersey, TNEC, New Jersey. I don't have it in front of me. Some of the workers who support Jews for Judaism have been former missionaries or former Christians themselves. And having come out of Christianity helped to strengthen and build the organization which today represents the only full-time organization of its kind in North America that works as a network to help prevent Jews from getting involved in Christianity and help Jews who aren't involved in Christianity in some form of missionary Christianity to come out of it. The presentation tonight will be predominantly given to you by the directors of the branches of Jews for Judaism from New York involved. Rabbi Michael Scovac is the director of the New York Office of Jews for Judaism. He has no, I'm going to ask him when he gets up to the microphone that he just gives you a rundown of some of his history, but he's been in this business now for eight years. And I have to say it is his business to work and try and help Jews in a situation where they're involved in missionary Christianity being encountered with the truth of Judaism in regards to these issues. Also, my power, so as the director of the Baltimore Office of Jews for Judaism has been doing this for quite a while. He was formerly the coordinator of Harrisburg, and he will be also one of the seminar leaders tonight. My third lead also will be speaking, and that will be later on this evening. My name is Judy Assis. Tonight's program is the first of two parts. We have inaugurated the program to try and deal as much as an in-depth encounter with the issue of missionary problems that exist in North America today, and to try and give you as much information to help you deal with these problems. The program was initially scheduled as a seminar, a training seminar for educators, rabbis, community workers. The reason being we did this is because we felt it was very necessary to help those who were in a position to help other Jewish people know how to deal with these issues. I say so myself specifically because I know that in my experience having been involved in Christianity in my former years, that one of the things that I found great difficult was to find a sensitive ear to the Jewish community that would understand my problems. So it is that I'm hoping that from tonight's experience and tomorrow's educational seminar that we will come away from this six hours of intense learning, very first to handle the missionary problem which some people think is just a myth. Program tonight will start off with an overview of the missionary problem that will be given by Rabbi Michael Skoback. Then we will come into a viewing of some very interesting booklet missionary videos. Videos are some of the videos that are produced by the missionary organizations themselves. You get a chance to see hands-on that they are promoting in the world. And then something that I'm sure all of you are looking forward to is great. We'll be having a seminar on the personality profile of the person who gets involved. Lastly, a former missionary in the Catholic School. Last and actually, last and last. Last and last, these will be questions and answers and we'll hope you'll have a nice dialogue with that between everybody. So to begin the evening, I'd like to call upon Rabbi Michael Skoback of the New York Office of Jewish Jews to begin the interview once that is short shot over the year. What I really wanna begin doing tonight is to paint the picture for everyone. And I hope that it's gonna be a picture that is not painted with brushstrokes that are too broad. I wanna try and fill in some of the details. But I'd like to really give you an overview of the missionary problem as it really faces the Jewish community today where the bit of a background is how we got here. And the first thing I really wanna clear up for everyone is when we go to a bowl game in the States, they always say that you can't tell the players without a scorecard. And I wanna really clear up for ourselves. What do we mean when we talk about missionaries? Who are we referring to? Who's behind this? And I know that there are certain images that come up when we hear the word missionary. A lot of people think of, well, the people that hand out literature on the street or the people that may come knocking at my door. And that's the image that usually comes up when we think of missionary. I got a phone call last year from a Hillel director at the University of Ohio in Columbus. It's a very large school of about 50,000 students. And he was calling me about another matter to speak about Jewish identity issues. And he found out I was working with Jews for Judaism and said, you know, we really don't have much of a missionary problem here in Ohio. And I said, oh, why do you say that? He said, well, because we used to see people on campus with tables set up, giving out literature and they had programs, and we don't see that anymore. And I asked him if there were any born-again Christians on this campus. And he said, this is the Midwest. The places, so what we have out here are born-again Christians. I told him that you have a missionary problem. And the reason I say that is because our competition, Jews for Jesus, did a study not too many years ago where they asked the Jewish people who had converted to Christianity. How did you get involved? How were you brought in to Jews for Jesus? Were those type of groups? And the overwhelming majority of them responded by saying it wasn't through a pamphlet that was given to them. It wasn't through a professional missionary that came calling on the door. By and large, it was through the influence of a Christian friend, neighbor, or business associate. Now when we speak about these Christian friends and neighbors, who are we dealing with? So the Christian community is not monolithic. We're used to a Jewish community that has different flavors, orthodox, conservative reform. And we're used to that. And we think of Christians. The Christians, it's one big happy group out there. And when you open a phone book, you'll see there were literally hundreds of denominations. Catholic, the Catholic sector of the Christian community is no longer involved with trying to convert Jews. They're literally out of the business. So when we speak about missionaries to Jews, we're not really dealing with the Catholic Church by and large. That leaves us primarily the Protestant movement, which is immense. And for oversimplification purposes, I'm going to really break down the Protestant community into liberal Protestant groups and conservative Protestant groups. As far as we're concerned, the liberal Protestant churches, the liberal Protestant groups don't really pose a threat to us in terms of conversion. The Jewish community usually has problems with the liberal Protestant churches when it comes to the state of Israel, the generally anti-Israel on the political scene. So the people that we're going to be dealing with tonight are the conservative Protestants. They refer to themselves as born-again Christians. Often we'll use the terms fundamentalist, evangelical. Now, it's surprising to many people how significant a sector of the Christian world this is. In the United States, there were polls done by famous pollsters Gallup and Harris that determined that there were approximately 60 million born-again Christians in the US. That's about one out of five Americans in the US identifying as a born-again Christian. That's why in Columbus, Ohio, which is the heart of the Midwest and the Southwest of the United States, they're basically communities that are essentially through and through born-again Christian. And Jewish people that are living there will on a day-to-day basis have contact with born-again Christians. And in New York City, which is not the hotbed of the Bible Belt, anyone that works has someone that's a Bible-believing born-again Christian that shares a conference room that rides to work on a bus that's a neighbor that we meet on a day-to-day basis. These are the people that feel and important to share the gospel with us, the Jewish community. It's interesting that my parents live in New Jersey. And there was an article that appeared in the front page of the local secular paper, The Bergen Record, about three women that started a beauty parlor in Ferala, New Jersey called the Heavenly Touch Beauty Parlor. And these are three women that, aside from cutting hair, are born-again Christians. They take their religion very seriously. And they were interviewed in this article as to why they chose to open up their beauty parlor in Ferala. And they said that because we know that Ferala is a community with thousands of Jews, and we're very interested in reaching these Jewish people, these are not professional missionaries. These are just the balabatim, the regular people, the lay people. And when we speak about missionaries, when I'm going to speak about missionaries tonight, I'm speaking about any Christian that believes in the Testament literally and that feels it's imperative to share their faith. So let's get down to the first question, why? What impels them to try and share their faith of the people? I'm not sure if it happens up in Canada, but in the States, if you ever go to a football game or watch one on TV, there's always people holding up big signs that say John 316. Anyone see that here as a familiar side or not? Not overwhelmingly. John 316 is a passage in the New Testament in the book of John, chapter 3 verse 16, which says that God so loved the world that he sent his only sons so that all who believe in him shall have everlasting life and not perish. Well, the flip side of having everlasting life is that you perish. So the Christian belief is that all non-born-again Christians will spend their eternity in hell, and they believe that very deeply. And that is the primary motivating factor for why Christians will spend 15 years in Algeria as missionaries to maybe convert one Muslim, why they might go to Africa to spend 10, 15 years, why they find it so important to speak about Jesus incessantly to their friends and neighbors, because they honestly believe that they're going to be saving your soul. On a certain level, it's coming from a very altruistic place. What doesn't get answered here, though, is why the focus on Jewish people? Of all the ethnic groups in the world, we are the only group that singled out, especially, as a target for conversion. Let's give you one simple example. I spent five years in Philadelphia and working at Temple University, and we had 6,000 Jewish students at Temple University. There were 1.1 Jewish organizations at Temple University to spread Judaism among Jewish kids. We had a Hillel, the neighborhood Hillel, which was there all the time. And there was a La Babbage group that came down once in a while for a holiday. That was the Jewish presence on campus. We had 13 groups that came specifically to convert Jews to Christianity. And that's not an unusual number of groups to be working on college campus. But there were no other groups singled out. There were Muslim students on campus. There was no Muslims for Jesus groups. There's no Baha'i for Jesus groups. There's no Puerto Ricans for Jesus. There's no other group that's singled out, but Jewish people are singled out. And I want to explore with you for a few minutes why that is so. Why are we a big deal? First of all, the New Testament places a priority upon the Jewish people. To remember the times of Jesus, he only went and spoke to Jews. He specifically said that he only came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That was his mission. And he told his disciples not to go unto the cities of the Gentiles, only to the Jews. Later on, there was a mandate to spread the gospel to the rest of the world. And still Paul taught in the book of Romans that the gospel is to go to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles. So there's a priority in the New Testament itself with the Jewish people. The second reason, probably a more compelling one now it is. I spend about an hour or two a week going to Christian bookstores. It's one of the things I do, my job. And one of the topics that Christians are fascinated with is the topic of eschatology. That's a fancy word for the Hebrew Aharitayamim, for the end of days. Christians have a fascination with prophecy, with the Bible predicting what's going to happen now. Are these the days the Bible speaks of? And there are entire sections in Christian bookstores, whole rows of books dealing with prophecy, dealing with prophecy in the Jewish people. It's a topic that comes up constantly in Christian conversation in magazines. And one of the things that Christians believe very strongly is that they are now living at the very end of time. That they are rapidly approaching the end of history and that the return of Jesus is imminent. They sense it very greatly. And one of the years that's thrown about as the target date for the second coming of Jesus is the year 2000. It's not an unusual date because if you go back in history to the year 1000, which was the first millennium, there was a tremendous amount of anticipation and expectation that Jesus would come back in that year. It didn't happen, so now it's the year 2000. And there's a tremendous feeling, and there are many articles written about spreading the gospel by the year 2000 reaching the world by the year 2000 and harvesting all the unsafe souls by the year 2000. There's one problem. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that he will not come back until the Jewish people welcome him. Until they say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Now this passage is understood by many Christians to mean that it's imperative that the Jewish people be converted before Jesus can return. And that is one of the things that drives Christians to focus their energies on Jewish people. Many of us have been told by Christians that they'd rather convert one Jew than 20 non-Jews. We're very special. That is a third reason, and a certain level, the most real and the most powerful, which is the psychological reason. Jesus came to the Jewish people in the land of Israel claiming to be the Jewish Messiah. The people that he came to were the only people in the world who knew anything about the idea of a Messiah, anything about the Bible, anything about prophecies. He didn't go and make his claims to the Romans, to the Greeks, to the Pagans, to the Barbarians. So the Jewish people were presented with the claims of this person from Nazareth. And he wasn't the only one who thought he was the Messiah. We know that there were at least four people back then in the times of the Roman persecutions who thought they were the Messiah. So Jesus had his claim put forward and essentially was rejected by the Jewish people. They determined that based upon what the Bible teaches, this person is not the Messiah. The famous story that's told, I've just repeated here in sort of a modern setting. I told it last night. It told a story about a missionary about 150 years ago in Russia. But it actually happened to me a few years ago in Buffalo, New York, where one of the missionaries at this conference I was at was haranguing me and saying that the Jewish people are misled, that those evil rabbis constantly mislead the Jewish people. And they're constantly telling them to do the wrong thing. And it's all the rabbis' fault because the rabbis are basically ignorant and stupid. And it's proved to me that the rabbis were ignorant and stupid was that the greatest rabbi that ever lived in the times of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiba, he thought that Bar Kokhba was the Messiah. Isn't that a joke? That was his message to me. So I asked him, how do you know that Bar Kokhba wasn't the Messiah? And he said, well, obviously he was killed by the Romans. That was an obvious realization by the Jewish people. This is a person that clearly wasn't the Messiah. It's probably realistic to say that Jesus himself recognized that when on the cross he cried out in bitter disappointment, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So for the past 2,000 years, Christianity has become by and large a gentile religion, a religion of non-Jews. And they've always had the nagging question, the nagging problem. You know, the Jews though, they should have accepted Jesus. They should have been the ones to know it was their Messiah, it was their Bible. So it has been this nagging problem of the credibility of Jesus because the only people that really would have known back then rejected him. And that's been eating at Christians that are honest for 2,000 years. Our very existence on a certain level is a bone in the throat. It's very interesting that missionaries, maybe they went to a barbarian Spain known as barbarian France 1,000 years ago and told a story about a Jewish person who was the Messiah and died and he bore your sins and he was resurrected and he's the savior. And these barbarians say, wow, that's such a great thing, I think I'm gonna convert. And then the pagan says, gee, I bet the people back in Palestine, they must really go for this story. And the missionary says, well, I'll tell you the truth, they don't believe it at all. It's interesting that the further you go back in time and in place through the events of Jesus' life, the least likely it is that they were believed. And this is very disturbing to Christians who take their religion seriously. The New Testament says that since there's now a New Testament, the Old Testament is obsolete, it's faded away. So how is it that if the Old Testament is obsolete, it's faded away, there were Jews today practicing Judaism from the Old Testament, that there are Jews today that are practicing this dead religion? Maybe it's not a dead religion. Maybe there's a problem with our New Testament. And therefore there's this annoying desire to convert the Jews. The problem they've had historically is that they were never able to. It's been probably in the history of the world the greatest failure of any project ever undertaken. If you think about it honestly, they've had 2,000 years, that's plenty of time. They've had unlimited resources, practically unlimited manpower, tremendous amount of desire and drive. The use over the years of tremendous tools of persuasion like swords, like money, like persecutions. And nothing ever worked. The Jewish people basically said, I am born a Jew, I'm gonna die a Jew, you can kill me. I'm not interested. My father tells a story that after the Holocaust, he was completely wiped out, his family was destroyed, he was orphaned, no one was left. And he told me that American mission groups came to Europe to do relief work. And that they offered these young Jewish orphans, my father was 13 or 14, we'll get you clothing and food, job training, we'll send you to New Zealand, we'll get you a gnome, everything for free, no problems, just have to get baptized. My father told me that him and his friends, they took all the food and clothing and they just left. But that was the extent to which people went. And Jews came to America after the war, in the Lower East Side and before the war, they were basically bribed with tremendous amounts of money. You can have tremendous security if you'll accept the gospel and Jews were not interested. The resulting problem was that there's a tremendous frustration that's built up among born-again Christians. It's their Jewish problem. What have we been doing wrong? How do we get through to these Jews? How do we get them to see the light? So they first began taking this problem seriously about 25 years ago. And they began having conferences and meetings and programs and seminars. And they had worldwide international programs. They had a big one in Thailand of all places. They had a big one in Switzerland of all places. But they've been meeting very, very seriously to discuss this problem. And to basically ask themselves, what have we been doing wrong? And how can we improve to be able to convert the Jews? And they came up with two basic realizations. Problem number one, anyone here that's in advertising or public relations, right, is gonna be sensitive to this. They said, you know what, we have a PR problem. The Jewish people are not running to go to church on Sunday and to sing hymns to Jesus Christ because what is the image, the association that Jews make with Jesus Christ and with Christianity and with churches? They recall 2,000 years of pogroms, holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, being beat up as children, you Christ killer, you killed our God, you dirty Jew. That's what Jews remember. So it's obvious that these people are not gonna be flocking into churches. That's problem number one. So to alleviate that problem is really not that difficult. The born again Christian community now tells us that they love the Jewish people. When I was in high school in New Jersey, all my born again friends would tell me, Michael, Jesus loves the Jewish people and God loves Israel and Michael, you have the smile of Jesus. And it's a tremendous effort to convey and it's sincere to a certain extent that they love us, why? Because the Bible says that those that bless you, I will bless those that curse you, I will curse. They wanna love the Jewish people, but ultimately it's part of an agenda. They realize that it's only the first step in getting our conversion. It's interesting that if you go back historically, it's not a new thing. If you go back to Martin Luther, who was the founder of the Protestant Reformation, he realized this as well. Martin Luther's critique of the Catholic Church was that they've been persecuting Jews. Why do they expect the Jews to convert? So Luther taught that you have to be friend the Jews, you have to be nice to the Jews, you have to be good to the Jews. And if you are nice to the Jews, they will come around and they will see the truth and they will accept the gospel. And in Luther's time, it just didn't work. And the reason it's interesting to focus on this for a second is that it's based upon a fallacy. We do not reject Christianity because it's anti-Semitic. That's not why the Jews in the first century rejected Jesus because he was an anti-Semite. We rejected Christianity because it wasn't true. It wasn't Jewish, no matter how nice they are. But that's the first level of response to our community. And therefore, over the past 15 years, we've seen a tremendous amount of outreach and love and concern from the moral majority, the born-again Christians. They go to all the rallies we have in support of the State of Israel, Soviet Jewry rallies. They work very hard for Israel. They send more tourists to Israel than we do. In Flatbush last year, before Yom Kippur in Brooklyn, we had a synagogue that was burned to the ground with six towers that were destroyed. And we had a public funeral on Coney Island Avenue, 20,000 people. And I noticed all the missionaries from Brooklyn were there because they want to show this solidarity with the Jewish people. They want us to understand that they like us, they love us, we shouldn't be afraid of them. But we come to the second problem. Ultimately, Jews don't accept Christianity because it's not Jewish. That's the reason that Jews have avoided conversion for centuries. So they came up with a brilliant solution to this problem. It's probably, in advertising and public relations, is brilliant a hap, a brilliant thing that you can come up with. And that's to tell Jewish people that when they become a Christian, when they accept Jesus, they don't have to give up being Jewish. Meaning you think that by accepting Jesus, you won't be Jewish anymore. You'll stop being Jewish. You'll become a Gentile. No, that's not the case. They make the claim with tremendous effect now that when you accept Jesus as a Jew, you're becoming a better Jew, a more fulfilled Jew, a completed Jew, a messianic Jew. You're a Jewish person who can still have your bagels and locks. You can still wear your kippah. You can still have Russian Shana services. You can still speak in Hebrew. You don't have to stop being Jewish, but you'll also have the Messiah. You'll be a messianic Jew, a completed Jew. And now Jewish people can have their cake and eat it too. We don't have to feel that we're being traders anymore. It used to be, it's interesting, that Jewish people, Jewish college student that accepted Jesus would come home and the parents would haramn them. You're not a Jew anymore, get out of here. And now these kids can say to their parents, what do you mean I'm not a Jew anymore? I'm a better Jew than you are, mom and dad. I wear a kippah. I keep kosher. I observe the Jewish holidays. I'm making aliyah next year. And I believe in the Messiah. So that's the trick they've come up with. They've packaged Judaism, I'm sorry, they've packaged Christianity in a way that is very appealing to Jews because it's very non-threatening. It looks so Jewish and how do they do this? The first step is to create a structure. And the structure they've created is something that they refer to as a messianic synagogue. And it's a brilliant move. Why? Because Jews are not interested in going to a church where there are pictures of Jesus and there are hymns to Jesus Christ and there are crosses and there's a priest. It has a flavor which is very un-Jewish. It's uncomfortable, it's foreign. That's not a big turn on to Jews. So now they can package it in a way which is palatable to Jews. They have a messianic synagogue. So you can come to our shul next week. We have Friday night services, we have a kiddish afterwards, the rabbi speaks. The person that runs the services is called not a pastor or minister, but a messianic rabbi. So there's a rabbi up front, no collar, he wears a yamlaka, he wears titzis, he wears a Jewish star. And not just the rabbi, by the way, but all the balabatim, that's the way they dress. It looks like you guys, right? That's what a Jews for Jesus shul looks like. So you're not gonna feel that you're going into a non-Jewish place. The prayers are in Hebrew and then you see Doreem. They have their own Sidurim, the Yehudim Meshichim. Prayer books for messianic Jews. With very familiar prayers, Don Olam, the Amida, Shema, Kaddish, Boruchu, Avtora readings. Okay, Bar Mitzvahs. It's very familiar. The holiday is only Jewish. You won't find Christmas holiday celebrated or Easter holiday celebrated. They celebrate Shabbat, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkosh, Shavu, Wisp, Purim, Hanukkah. And then they use a very sophisticated form of euphemism to create a language that's Jewish. So the entire language is changed to make Jews feel more comfortable. You won't hear the words Jesus Christ from these people's lips. He's referred to as Yeshua Hamashiach, which is Hebrew for Jesus Christ. But it's not that sound, Jews hear Jesus Christ. It's like someone scratching their fingernails on a blackboard. Yeshua Hamashiach sounds so Semitic. It has that guttural chah sound even. So that's a word that's very palatable to Jews. It's somehow not such a turn-off. Mary becomes Miriam. The New Testament becomes the Britah Chadasha, which is Hebrew for New Testament. But it doesn't sound so Gentile. No one is baptized anymore. It's called mikvah. They're gonna have a mikvah service. What's more Jewish than that? Until the point where even the names of the guilty have changed to sound like innocent names. So we have names of missionaries like Tuvio Zaretsky. It sounds very ethnically Jewish. And Tuvio Zaretsky's real name is Lloyd Carson. But it's not unusual to assume a name which sounds more Jewish, right? To take on a Jewish look. Now the way that these groups operate, and we'll probably be getting into this as we go through the entire seminar, is to engage in this form of deception, and ultimately infiltration of our community. Let me just mention a few things that are done that are outright deceptive. The claim is made that Christianity is so Jewish that even the rabbis are doing it. That's how Jewish it is. And every week I hear from another Jews for Jesus kid who tells me, you know Michael, there are many Orthodox rabbis that believe in Jesus. But they're afraid to tell anybody because they'll lose their jobs. But they secretly believe in Jesus. These Orthodox rabbis. I want to just tell you about two of these Orthodox rabbis to give you an idea of the legitimacy of the claim. One is an Orthodox rabbi named Isidore's Wern. And a couple of years ago, I received a letter from one of the missionaries in Maryland named Sid Roth. And he was trying to raise $140,000 to publish Rabbi's Wern's story. It's called A Rabbi Finds the Messiah. And I said send me a copy of it so I get the pamphlet. And it says that Rabbi Isidore's Wern is an Orthodox rabbi. He learned to read and pray from the Hebrew prayer book at the age of three. He went to the Ashiva of Rabbi as Jacob and Joseph in New York. And you read this pamphlet and it was obviously completely fraudulent. There must have been in the first five pages 25 outright lies. And I confirmed many of the mistakes and many of the lies by just calling up this Rabbi's Wern. He supposedly is a rabbi now in Burbank, California. He runs a Messianic Yashiva in Burbank, California. And I called him like I'm at dinner time and he was very candid with me. He didn't realize who I was. And he told me he was never ordained as a rabbi. He refers to himself as a Zionist rabbi but he was never ordained as an Orthodox rabbi. So we recalled, I called this fellow back who was gonna publish the books, the name Sid Roth. And I told him, look Sid, I said, the story is a lie. Don't you deprint it. If you do, I'm gonna smear your name all over the country. Because who needs him to have this little book out? Confusing and deceiving people. And he was very thankful. And you know, we're not gonna print it. Don't worry, thanks for all the corrections. And then we received a second fundraising letter saying that in a moment of prayer, the Holy Spirit revealed to us that we shouldn't publish this Wern piece. But what they did was they sort of corrected some of the mistakes and imprinted it. Second Orthodox Rabbi was a rabbi who went around for years under the name Michael Essys. He even wrote a book called Michael Michael, Why Do You Hate? It's interesting that a couple of months ago there was a missionary who's always calling me up from North Carolina telling me she's always dovening for me and my family. She wants us to see the light. So she told me that God told her, God told her that she should send me this book, Michael Michael, Why Do You Hate Me? And in this book, Michael Essys writes about being the spartic descendant of Orthodox Rabbi and he himself is an Orthodox Rabbi. The problem was that after he wrote the book, his wife Betty divorced him. And wrote a book called The Victim of a Tarnished Ministry where she exposes her husband as a fraud. She shows all the ordination papers that he forged, all the letters from Brooklyn where the Yeshiva never existed. Another Orthodox Rabbi who believes in Jesus. But the claim is made for a very important reason. When you meet many Jews for Jesus people, many of these regular people, they'll tell you, yeah, I came from an Orthodox background, went to a day school, went to Yeshiva. They're not gonna tell you generally, I come from a completely assimilated family. I knew nothing about Judaism. I had no Jewish education. Because then there's no big deal that they converted. So they will frequently overestimate, over-exaggerate, overstate the amount of Jewish education they had. There's a significant amount of infiltration by these groups into our community. They will frequently attend synagogues, Jewish community centers. They will join Jewish basketball teams. They'll come to programs like this. They'll go to any Jewish program that they can get their hands on for two main reasons. One, they wanna meet Jews. Their whole purpose is to convert Jews. What better place to meet Jews than in a Jewish institution? And they go to Yeshivas in Israel. We found them infiltrating by the Shuvah Yeshivas in Israel. They come to Daphyomy classes in the United States. They go to Jewish programs to meet Jews. And they go to Jewish programs to learn more about Judaism. If they wanna be able to communicate with the Jews and sound more part of the Jewish community, what better place to learn about the Jewish community than in classes, Hebrew classes, Israeli folk dancing classes, et cetera. So we found that at certain Hillels, back in the States, there were students who became president of the Hillel who were Jews for Jesus. We found in the States Hebrew school teachers who were missionaries. And they make a concerted effort to infiltrate our community. In the buying of cemetery plots, I mean, if they're Jews for Jesus, they wanna be buried in a Jewish cemetery. So they have both cemetery plots. So the publishing of books in Jewish publishing companies by missionaries. To sending their kids to Jewish summer camps to meet our kids. The list goes on and on and on. I wanna really conclude the first part of the program tonight by doing something which is unfortunately difficult to hear, but I really need to give you an idea as to how big this is. Am I talking about something which is just a few crazy people? So I really wanna give you the broad picture now of the world. What is happening in North America, in Israel, and in different continents? We estimate now, and really it wasn't our work, there was a Christian census taker, it's called a Missiologist in the church who did a report during the past year who estimates that there are over 140,000 Jews for Jesus now. Jewish people who believe in Jesus and still maintain the Jewish identity. We're not counting the Jewish people who go to a church, convert, and have nothing to do with Judaism. So the movement that we've been describing today is a movement which is significant in terms of its numbers. And more importantly, as far as we're concerned, in terms of its growth, it's basically grown 10 times in the past 10 years. And it's now moving into the second generation. So basically it was a movement of people in the 20s and 30s who got into it over the past 15, 20 years and now have babies. And they're raising their children as Hebrew Christians, as messianic Jews. And part of that means building yeshivas for their kids. So now they have in the States messianic day schools, messianic yeshivas. The kids are not gonna go to a public school, God forbid. They have to learn about the Torah, but from a Jewish point of view, Jewish for Jesus point of view. Let me describe to you briefly several of the groups that are now trying to convert us. You've all heard of Jews for Jesus, I assume. They're in Toronto, they have an office here. They're based in San Francisco in the States. As far as I know, they did not get destroyed in the earthquake. They have an annual budget now of approximately $8 million. That's just one organization. They have offices in New York, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Toronto. What does Jews for Jesus do? Now most Jews in New York, assume they do just one thing. They come into New York over the summer and they give out lots of literature and they make a big mess on the streets. And the other thing they do is they take out full page ads in Time Magazine, in Newsweek Magazine. Actually, it's what, 17 national magazines last year and hundreds of local large papers, newspapers. They spend about a million and a half dollars each year just on the newspaper ads. And this year they're gonna be offering a tape to the Jewish community with music on it and Bible stories and a tape designed to convert Jewish people for free, basically, to Jewish people. So we're aware of the fact that they give out stuff on the streets, that they put out full page ads in newspapers. Last year they began putting advertisements on subways in the cities, on buses in the cities. They do a lot more than that. For example, Jews for Jesus has a special ministry to Jewish deaf people. They have a special group of people that just call up Jewish deaf people on their special TTY phones, send literature to these Jewish deaf people, have special programs for Jewish deaf people. And one of the ways they meet them is they go to the special colleges like Gallaudet College in Washington for the deaf and they'll meet them and they'll start a Jewish club there. Jews for Jesus has a special band and we'll be seeing about them in a few minutes that goes around the whole world performing publicly to attract people to their programs. Jews for Jesus gets on the phone, they just call people in the phone book with Jewish standing names. They have over 100 full-time staff people and they work full-time trying to reach Jews. But I wanna tell you the most significant thing that they do as far as I'm concerned. Every week in hundreds of churches across the country, they put on programs in front of church groups. Why is that? They're not gonna reach many Jews in a church. But they actually are very bright. They recognize that they have 100 staff people, 100 people working for Jews for Jesus. How many Jews can they ever meet? They can hand out literature from now until Mashiach comes. They're not gonna give out to every single Jew with 100 people. So they've recognized that they have a standing army of 60 million concerned Christians in the US alone. And what they've recognized is that the most effective thing that they could do as an organization is to act as a catalyst to invigorate this army of 60 million people to speak to their friends and neighbors. Every born-again Christian in this country, even if they don't have a Jewish friend and neighbor, they probably have a Jewish doctor or a Jewish dentist. So these churches run programs to do two things. Number one, encourage lay Christians. Encourage the Christian Balabatim, the Christian lay people, just the regular person that goes to church to share the gospel with his Jewish friend and neighbor. You have to understand that the regular Christian is probably a little bit intimidated. They think that every Jew is an expert in the Old Testament. How can I talk to my neighbor? He's probably gonna wipe me out with the Bible. So they encourage these church people. Don't worry. The average Jew never even read the Bible. And they're right. So they encourage them to speak to their Jewish friends and neighbors. Secondly, they train them how to do it. How do you speak to a Jewish person? What do you tell them? How do you answer the objections they come up with? And they put out tapes, audio tapes. They have videotapes. They have books, they have manuals. I have in my library dozens of manuals and books put out teaching Christians how to share the gospel with their Jewish friends and neighbors. One just came out called, you bring the bagels, I'll bring the gospel. Training Christians how to convert the Jewish friends and neighbors. Another group I wanna bring your attention to is the Assemblies of God. Assemblies of God is not a missionary organization. It's a Christian denomination. And it's a relatively new one. It's only about 80 years old. And the Assemblies of God now has about three million members in the US and about 15 million worldwide. But they have decided as a movement, as a denomination to throw themselves into the conversion of the Jewish people. And they do a number of things to that end. For example, every single year, the Assemblies of God sponsors a Ruach conference where Assemblies of God pastors, ministers and lay people come and hear sessions over the course of three or four days on how to bring the gospel to Jewish people. And I've been to these Ruach conferences and I can tell you, they're very dedicated to spreading the gospel. So much so that the Assemblies of God has approximately 40 of these Jews for Jesus synagogue sponsored just under their auspices. So much so that at their Bible colleges, at their seminaries, where you go to become a minister or a pastor, where you study, that's their Yeshiva, you can now major in Jewish studies. You can get a degree now in Jewish studies at the Valley Forge Christian Bible College, for example, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Why would a young Christian kid get a major, his parents say, you're majoring in Jewish studies? That's what I raised you for. It's very strange, why would this kid go to major in Judaic studies? Because there are careers awaiting them to become a Messianic rabbi, a Messianic day school teacher, a Messianic canter, they even train Messianic mohalim now. We'll be seeing more about the Assemblies of God very shortly. Now, we tend to think of Jews for Jesus as that's the name. I want you to be aware of the fact that there are over 150 that we know of, different organizations like Jews for Jesus that are spending now over $100 million a year to reach Jewish people. We have a list, maybe later on in the questions and answers we'll read, just a list of the names of these groups that are out there. Jews for Jesus is the biggest one, $8 million budget. The American Board of Missions to the Jews called Chosen People Ministries about a four and a half million dollar budget. And many other groups that are adding million dollar budgets, but they all are working full time to bring the gospel to Jews. I mentioned Messianic synagogues before, these Jews for Jesus Hebrew Christian synagogues. Just to give you an idea as to how fast the movement is growing, about 10 years ago there were 12 that we had in the United States. Now there are over 120. So to grow from 12 to over 120 is phenomenal growth in just 10 years. And they've become organized, I guess like all Jewish communities have umbrella groups, so they have umbrella organizations that oversee the workings of these different synagogues. For example, there's the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, which is an umbrella group of many of these Hebrew Christian synagogues and many of these ministries to the Jews. And they have for example, every single summer, their Messiah Conference. And we were at the Messiah Conference for the last two summers where they get 2,000 Jews to these conferences. And they bring new people there to get excited and they see what a tremendous movement it is. And these are week long conferences where there are dozens and dozens and dozens of sessions. The session that was the most, probably the most forward over the past two years was encouraging American Jews for Jesus to make aliyah. And we'll be talking about Israel in a few minutes. Another umbrella group that they have is something called the Union of Messianic Jewish Conrogations, the UMJC. And we attended their conference this year in Norfolk, Virginia, attracting 1,200 Hebrew Christians, meeting for a week in Virginia. But these are groups which are very active, they're constantly meeting and the life of a Messianic Jew is completely in his Hebrew Christian synagogue. They go every Friday night to services, every Shabbos morning. They have Bible study Wednesday nights. That becomes their whole life. And their entire life is geared towards converting their mother, father, sister, brother, friends, relatives. I just got from Julius, an heir that came out in yesterday's Toronto Star. The headline here is Messianic Jewish. And it's called the Righteous Branch Ministry. Pastors, priests, ministers and leaders of old churches who claim the Messiah Jesus Yeshua as their head. God has spoken to you through his word in Jeremiah chapter 31. Publish you, praise you and say, oh Lord, save your people the remnants of Israel. There'll be a program here, praying for the peace of Jerusalem. And this is typical of the growth. We're in Toronto, I believe there are now about four or five groups, just in Toronto now, trying to reach the Jews. And it's just the beginning for them. They are targeting a city like Toronto, which is a large Jewish population in Canada. The Messianic movement that I've been describing basically was a product of the US. We import a lot of garbage. And they are now going beyond the US borders. It used to be 10 years ago that Jews for Jesus was in the big city, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York. They are now in every little shtetl in the US. We got a call recently from San Terce, Puerto Rico. There's a rabbi Marx there that has a Beth Shullo Messianic synagogue. They're in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They're in Arkansas. They're in Wyoming. They're in Virginia. They're in, excuse me? In Harrisburg. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania of all places. They are now almost saturating the US. They're beginning to realize that it's time for them to move beyond the US borders. So over the past five years, we've seen a tremendous amount of movement down to South America, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela. A significant movement towards Europe, believe it or not, going after the Jewish people that are remnants in Poland. They go after Jews in France, England. We're now finding a tremendous movement towards South Africa, Australia. The most disturbing thing we've heard lately is that with glassnust, they're now sending missionaries to Russia to convert the Jewish people in Russia itself. You know, it's interesting that for the past number of years, the United States was the place that they tried to convert Soviet Jews. They're living now near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. There are about 40 to 50,000 Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach. And they run seven different programs in Brighton Beach just to convert the Soviet Jews there. They have free summer camps. Get your kid out of the hot city, send them to the mountains for the summer, for free in Ashford, Connecticut. And we just spoke to a family, a mother with her three kids. They came from Russia, went to Israel, now in Brooklyn, and they joined the church this summer. They were often Ashford, Connecticut. Generally speaking, until glassnust started, the missionaries would go to the exit places in Ladispole in Vienna, and they would meet these Soviet Jews coming out of Russia, and they'd say, look, we'll give you English language classes here. And over the past two or three years, they finally have come out of the closet. In Israel, these people were very private for the last 30, 40, 50 years. And they've now been encouraged to go to the streets, and they're now putting ads in Israeli newspapers, taking out commercials and radios. They're going out and heading out literature. They're running programs for example. Last year for Shavuas, they ran a special program in honor of the 40th anniversary of the State of Israel, Shavuot 88. And they brought 1,200 Jewish Christians, Hebrew Christians to Jerusalem for a special conference. You all heard of the Mormon Center that was built at the cost of over 30 million dollars in Israel. It's interesting that the Mormons claimed consistently they have no interest in converting Jewish people. Although this year they published the Book of Mormon in Hebrew, and we have already for years from them a special training manual on how to convert the Jewish people published by the Church of Latter-day Saints in Utah. These 40 Israeli branches, these 40 Israeli Jews for Jesus Synagogues are now becoming more sophisticated. So one of them called Ma'o's Ministries, run by Ari Sorkoram, is now in the United States raising money to build a messianic Yishiva and training institute in Israel. He wants to train special rabbis in Israel to convert the Jews in Israel. And there are several of the groups in this country that are now building large institutions in Israel. And I met an Israeli yesterday in Shul from Bat-Yam near Tel Aviv who told me, he says, yes, we know about this. He says every family knows about it in Israel. He felt that every family knows someone in Israel who's been involved with Jews for Jesus. I want to say that this is a disturbing phenomenon. And among Jewish people, there are very few issues which get us excited anymore as a community at large. We have a very fragmented community. Into marriage used to be a problem which shook Jewish families and destroyed Jewish families. It's now up to about 50%. So it's no longer unusual. They're not afraid of what the neighbors are gonna say. But in Jews for Judaism, we deal with families that are destroyed, literally on a daily basis. We meet families that nothing worse, except for a death, God forbid. But just about as bad as it's gonna get is they have a child now that believes in Jesus and thinks that the grandmother and grandfather and the parents are gonna burn in hell and that their whole relationship is now strained with their child. So it's a problem which we really want to help the Toronto Jewish community address. We're hoping during the rest of the evening tonight to really give you more of a personal insight into who gets involved with these groups. What kind of person gets involved? How does it actually happen? Is it possible? It's so my father told me that he can't believe it. When he was growing up, if you would have told him there'd be Jews who believed in Jesus, he would not believe it. And he didn't live 500 years ago. And now, unfortunately, it's a phenomenon which we're confronting as a community and we're hoping over the next two days to give you some insight into its nature and guide willing in how to respond. I wanna thank you for your attention and we'll now show a video, two videos. Okay. Okay, we've got a slight problem in that the VCR that was supposed to be here to show us our videos is not here. Unless somebody brought a VCR, we're going to attempt a very quick experiment and should we do the profile now or should we take the break now? Just a couple of quick comments about the videos that we saw. I don't know how you can eat after seeing something like that. I personally can only eat during them. Couple of comments. Number one, you saw the gentleman at the end dancing down the aisle with the talus flying and so forth and so on. Guy by the name of Ray Gannon who made aliyah to Israel back in June. He's now waving his talus there. There is a concerted effort on the part of the Hebrew Christians to encourage their people to make aliyah right now, as Michael mentioned earlier. Let's see, what other good stuff did I have to tell you about the video? The Assemblies of God, no, he is not Jewish. He is not Jewish. You know how you can tell the Jews in that video? The Jews are the ones that are not wearing the kippahs. The non-Jews are the ones that are wearing the kippahs. It's true, it really is true. For those of you who did not make the identification, Assemblies of God really has gotten a lot of play over the last year or so in the media because the Assemblies of God, that's the denomination to whom Jimmy Swagger was attached, to whom Jim Baker was attached. Just a quick aside, yeah, I was telling Michael earlier, I was writing down the Expressway in Baltimore the other day when the news came over about Jim Baker receiving 45 years for bilking people out of thousands of dollars and I laughed so hard I almost lost control of the car, it was just, I'm sorry, I think he got less than he deserved. Anyhow, my segment this evening, by the way, again I'm Mark Powers, I'm director of Jews for Judaism in Baltimore. Formerly from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where I ran the Jews for Judaism office for seven and a half, almost eight years and then transferred into the Baltimore area. So both Michael and I have been working in this, I don't know what we would call it, to be honest with you, this area for a good number of years. Ministry, okay. Praise God. And we're the ones that confront on a daily basis the kind of things that you saw here tonight. The question that was raised and what I'm going to address tonight is who in the world gets involved with this stuff? I mean, we all know that the profile of the individual who gets involved in this, number one, they're the Looney Tunes, they're the ones that are so disaffected from everything that they have trouble getting up in the morning, they are the people who have no relationships whatsoever with their family or any other family, they're the ones that are generally unmarried and so forth and so on down the line, right? What is that, 40% of the population? Wrong. Wrong. That's right, it's wrong. The person that gets involved in this can be just about anybody. And in fact, the missionaries target just about every segment of the Jewish community for what they're selling. And so why is their sell so good? What is it about this that makes Jews want to embrace it? What are they offering that we're not? Well, the first thing that you have to look at, I guess, is the demographics of the Jewish community. We have raised in this generation, and I don't think I'm telling you anything that you don't know, probably the most Jewishly ignorant generation that has ever existed. Now, this crowd here looks like a fairly intelligent group. And so I don't know if this is going to work, although I'm gonna give it a shot anyhow, but usually what we do to demonstrate the point is we give you a little Jewish IQ test. Now, by a raise of hands, please, how many of you can name the supposed birth date of what's his name? Comes in December. How many of you? The birthday of Jesus in December, right? Great. How many of you can name the birth date of Moses? Yeah, I thought so. There are ringers in this audience. All right, how many can name the mother of Jesus? Mother of Jesus? How about the mother of Moses? Yeah, boy, you're a terrible audience. You are atypical, let me tell you. Most of the audiences that we speak to, we get everybody knows December 25th and Mary, but everybody goes, you know what it is? I don't know what it is. I didn't know Moses had a mother. All right, one more. How many of you can name the Pope of the Catholic Church? What? Pope of the Catholic Church. All right? Great. Name one of the two chief rabbis of Israel. How many? Forget it, I can't do this with you guys. You guys are terrible. Okay, fine. Generally speaking, to any audience that we speak to, and again, you're very atypical. No answers, no answers at all. So we have raised the generation of Jews who are basically ignorant, Jewishly. And in fact, the Jews for Jesus training manual says very clearly that this is a golden opportunity for us, the Jews for Jesus, for us to go and plant and reap all of these Jewish souls who are ignorant of their Jewishness. And they do it in the most obvious of ways. First of all, generally speaking, you have individuals who, if they've had any connection to Jewishness, they have gotten at best mixed signals from their families. That's at best. But in most cases, Judaism was nothing to be proud of at home. If they went to a synagogue twice a year at best, and what was it? A fashion show, right? No different. So what is there in the Jewishness that they know? And you will hear it from them. We hear it from them all the time. Yeah, I know what it is to be Jewish. I was raised in a Jewish household. We went to synagogue twice a year. I know what it is. My mother brought empire chickens, and so Judaism holds absolutely nothing for them. And if they see anything in Judaism at all, they see hypocrisy. They see hypocrisy at home. They see hypocrisy, unfortunately, in most of the Jewish institutions that they've had some relationship to or with. They see it in their Jewish friends who also feel nothing for their Jewishness. They have never been exposed to anything that is true in Judaism. So you get some Bible thumping missionary who comes to them as this girl that we know. And when she was questioned and we said to her, well, you know, what was it? What was it that made you accept Christianity? And she said with a straight face, you know, I was searching for something in my life and I knew that there was a God because what I got at home was no good. And then my Christian friend showed me the most amazing thing that I have ever seen in my entire life. And it was right there in the Christian Bible. And that's why I accepted Christianity. No. And what was it that was the most amazing thing that she had ever seen in her entire life? Why, it was that most amazing statement from Christianity that goes, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And this is what brought her to Christianity. Amazing. Not at all. We have raised an ignorant Jewish generation. And when the missionary goes and says, look, I can show you 300 places in your Bible where it mentions the name Jesus. And they go, ooh, I didn't know that. And the missionary flips through the Bible, in Hebrew, by the way, and shows them Yeshua. It's right there. Time after time after time. It's his name. There it is. Look, it's your Bible all over the place. Why shouldn't they buy it? And not only that, but they're introducing them to a religion and a feeling and a spirituality that they have never seen before. They are introducing them to a friendly atmosphere, a joyous atmosphere, a lively atmosphere as you just saw, other than Simphastora. It was the last time you saw anybody dancing down the aisle in Shul. Not too often. If at all. I went to a synagogue in London. That's another story. They go into these places and they feel a spirit, a love that they have never experienced before. Why shouldn't they grab it? The synagogue that they go to twice a year, or more often, if they're lucky, they walk in, they're the new face. After all, they don't show up very often. They walk in, they sit down somewhere, and everybody looks around. Hey, who's that? I don't know who it is. Do you invite him? No, I didn't invite him. And you get 20 people turning around. I don't know who that is, maybe he belongs to Dave. No, Dave doesn't know who he is. And in fact, more than likely, through the entire time that they're in that synagogue, nobody will say anything to them at all, except for the one guy. And there's one in every synagogue. The one guy who goes over to them and says, excuse me, sir, but I think you're in my seat. But you walk into one of these Hebrew Christian places and you cannot get five feet inside that door. Before 20 people come over to you, pump your hand, pat you on the back, give you a hug, and say, gee, I'm glad you're here, and mean it. Why shouldn't they go for it? It is the most open, loving, spirit-filled thing they have ever seen or felt in their entire lives. And then you back it up with 300 places in the Bible that mentions Jesus by name or Isaiah 53, which clearly talks about the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus, and we all know that, right? Or Isaiah 714, which talks about the virgin birth, we all know that one too. Why shouldn't they buy it? And they are buying it. They are buying it in droves. We estimate 140,000, as Michael mentioned. I think it's a conservative estimate. And make no mistake that these Hebrew Christian places are nothing more than a halfway house, a stopping place on the way out of Judaism. The objective of Jews for Jesus is not to create Hebrew Christian synagogues. The objective of Jews for Jesus and other missionary groups is to mainstream these people into the church. And while we sit here and estimate 140,000 Jews who are involved in Hebrew Christianity, I cannot tell you, nor can I even begin to imagine. How many have been mainstreamed into the church? And so what is the profile of this individual? This individual that buys what they're selling. And who is it that the missionary is going to? The individual is everybody within the Jewish community. There is not a segment of the Jewish community that isn't targeted. Michael mentioned the death. One particular group that I am very, very close to is that of the Soviet Jewish community. I've been to the Soviet Union four times. And what is happening to Soviet Jews there in transit and here is appalling. In Ladispoli, Italy, there are today, as we sit here, approximately 13,000 Russian Jews. They are sitting and they are waiting. They are two-time refuseniks. They have been refused firstly by the Soviet Union and more recently they have been refused by the United States. They have been refused refugee status and so they must wait until they receive permission to enter the United States. And that's where they want to go. They do not want to go to Israel. They want to come to the United States. And four doors down from the Joint Distribution Committee where there is one Lubavitch rabbi working. Four doors down is the American Club. The American Club is run by the conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society. And they are running programs in English. They are showing movies in English. They are encouraging these people in any way they possibly can. And the rabbi there says, don't go there. That's Christian. It's not us. And they get indignant. I have just been released from the Soviet Union where all my life I was told what to believe, what not to believe and now here when I am free, you're going to start telling me again where I should go, who I should listen to, what I should or shouldn't believe, they don't want to hear it. But more than the American Jew, more than the Canadian Jew, more than the assimilated Israeli, these Russian Jews are like a blank slate. A blackboard upon which anything can be written. And Reverend McElwood of the American Club is doing just that. We received a phone call from somebody that we know in Florida. This person has a strong feeling for what we do and she said, I want to tell you a story. She said, in my capacity as part of the Federation down here, a note came across my desk that a new Russian Jewish family was coming to town and I thought that's great. And so I put together my welcome to the Jewish community kit and I got a couple of hollers because Shabbos was coming up and I took candlesticks and I took a bottle of wine and I went out to the airport to meet them. She had the flight number, the time that they were arriving. She went out to the airport to the lounge and she gets there and she sees there's bunches of people milling around and they're waiting for the same flight. They look like they're all together. So she strikes up a conversation with one of them. Yeah, they're waiting for the same flight. In fact, they're waiting for this Russian Jewish family and isn't it wonderful that they're coming in? Oh, and by the way, we're the group that sponsored them here. We're from Calvary Baptist Church. A mother, two sons, age 18 and 21. This Baptist Church got them an apartment rent free for a year, found jobs for all three family members, got them furniture, food and clothing. Their only obligation, you know what it is, go to church. This family was a graduate of the American Club in Ladispoli and the tragedy was the same day that this family was coming into Florida. Two more, two more sponsored by Baptist churches were coming into Tennessee. And now the missionaries are not content to wait until they get to Ladispoli or until they arrive in the United States or even to Israel. There are three missions this year of missionary groups to the Soviet Union. Even Christian, now our West Coast Director, brought back. And he said, you know what, there was an amazing thing that happened. This concert, too small for all the people that came and there were thousands of people in Leningrad who wanted to come here, Shlomo Kong. Many people are black slaves upon which anything at all can be written. And the Israelis, in Los Angeles, the Israelis are being targeted right now today. There's a whole community of Israelis in the Los Angeles area that Jews for Jesus specifically has targeted and are in the process of producing literature specifically geared towards them in Hebrew, the elderly. You saw Ruth on the tape. Ruth who finally accepted what's his name. In Florida where there is a high percentage of senior citizens, they are the target. The missionaries go into the senior citizen highrises. They offer to take them shopping. They offer to sit with them, to read to them, to be friends with them, anything possible to bring them the message of Jesus. There is no group, college, high school, elderly, Russian, Israeli. You saw this wonderful woman in the Midwood section of Brooklyn where Michael lives. She's his neighbor. The Midwood section of Brooklyn, which is a Hasidic section. She's there. There is no segment whatsoever of the Jewish community that is immune to them. And there is absolutely nothing that they will do, will not do to get their message across. As the apostle Paul said to the Jew, I come as a Jew. To the Greek, as a Greek. To those under the law, I come as under the law. I will do anything in any way to reach anybody for the Lord. Deception is their watchword. And why are more people buying it? You asked me the question earlier. Because as you can see, if you compare it to what they have experienced in their lives from Judaism, the Judaism that they have been presented with is empty. It has no feeling. It is cold at best. And with a little twisting and a little pointing out to names and with a lot of hugging and kissing and caring, they have been shown something that they can embrace. So the profile is just about anyone. Mainly it's an individual who is in transition. Somebody who is on the way in between, in between jobs, in between schools, in between love affairs, where somebody from a missionary group will reach out and care for that individual and show them the love, the warmth, the affection and the personal relationship with God that they have never seen in Judaism. What we'd like to do now is we'd like to have somebody who's been there tell you from his perspective, the wise, the wherefores, so that perhaps you'll get a keener insight into why an individual gets involved in Hebrew Christianity. And when we finish with that, we'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thanks very much. I'm the former missionary, the former messianic Jew, the former Hebrew Christian that was referred to in the ads. That is your guest speaker tonight. And some of you have heard me before, so what I have to say is not going to be too new, except that you know I'm here tonight, not because I'm looking for a stage to speak on. I'm here sincerely because to my knowledge, I believe we have a serious problem out there. You know, when I watched the video, you know, some of you were probably on Shpilchus, not believing what you were seeing on that screen. But look at me, and you will see somebody who is responsible for much of what you saw there. A lot of the pamphlets that you saw that came by the screen were designed for yours truly. I was a choir leader for a congregation that exists in Toronto, and we performed in much the same way as that lively, spirited group that you saw there, causing churches of Christians to get so excited about the idea of converting Jews, and we meant it with all our hearts. You see, for me, just as Michael and Mark had mentioned, the most spiritual thing that ever came into my life, the most pure way that I've understood anything about God was in the context of Christianity. Am I speaking too close to the mic? Thank you. I was raised in an assimilated home, and am I too far from the mic now? Oh, it's on. I was raised in an assimilated home, assimilated in no more of the way that many of us were raised. We went to Hebrew school, we had bar mitzvah, and after bar mitzvah, life was nice, except not Jewishly, it didn't mean anything. My parents had a kosher home, but the holidays were rather meaningless. Most of my friends were already interdating, so why not interdate? This interdating process led me to meet a lovely Christian girl, and it was through this lovely Christian girl that I was introduced to the possibility of the first time of being a Jew as well as a Christian. Now, why would I want to be such a thing? To tell you the truth initially, I thought it was a great compromise. Here I can marry a girl who wasn't Jewish, and not compromise on anything that meant things Jewishly to me. What she did was find out about a group in Toronto, a congregation of Jewish people that believed in Jesus, and asked me to go and experience a Erzshebat service there, and much the same of what you saw in the video was happening in this meeting. The spiritual leader wore a skull cap, prayer shawl, came equipped with a really big nose, bald head, his name was Ed Brotsky, a very nice man. And when I went to this group, everyone was very nice, and everyone really liked me, but then of course that's understandable, everybody does. But they really liked me, and I knew that they were very sincere. The combination of several months of being exposed to Christian writing, being exposed to this group, going to Bible studies, learning things about God that I never understood before really started to change my outlook on what it meant to be a Jew, and also what it meant to believe in who the Messiah was. Now there was a point when I decided, you know what, I really am going to speak to a rabbi, and I went to a rabbi. I won't say who, but it was in Toronto. And the rabbi was clueless as to the needs emotionally of somebody in my situation. And when I started talking to him about wanting to convert to Christianity, and why should I not, he started yelling at me, looking at me like I was Miss Shiget, basically gave me a quick five minute lecture and told me he was too busy to talk to me anymore, after I'd already made an appointment to see him, and that was it. I walked out of that place that night, out of that particular synagogue, and I asked myself, I have two choices here. One is to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and it's being told to me by these loving, kind, warm, giving Christians who have shown me all this hospitality and care and nurturance. And on the other hand, I had Judaism, no defense, no love, no sincerity, just a man who didn't have time or day to give me an opportunity to understand what it was all about. And in this environment, I rejected Judaism. At least I rejected the option of checking it out further, and jumped into the arms of the waiting Christians and they listened to say they were very happy. But I just didn't do it for an emotional reason. They gave me reason to believe. They gave me their Isaiah 53 and there are Isaiah 714 and all the different biblical reasons they have to believe in what they believe in. And I bought it hook, line, and sinker. You gotta understand also, I bought it hook, line, and sinker because I had no basis upon which to judge. I didn't know Borscht. I knew Borscht about Judaism. That's all I knew. I went to six years Haider, one of which I failed. Now, why they let me get to grade three after failing grade two? And never, I didn't improve my marks by against the Ed Raachmanus on me. I went six years Haider and still I didn't know anything about Davening. I didn't know anything about the Jewish faith and my parents and their post-holocaust ignorance thought that the Haider system here would turn me into a Jew. And unfortunately, it failed miserably. So in this environment of being Jewishly ignorant, I started learning about Judaism through the eyes of a Christian. And needless to say, I may not be a university graduate. I might not have a Einstein's IQ, but I really regarded myself as having some basic intelligence and being able to make some sound decisions for myself. When the Christian came up to me and opened up their Bible and they said to me, Julius, who does this sound like? Is speaking to you? And they would read to me from the book of Isaiah, a passage when we read from the King James Version without having any understanding of Hebrew English, a Hebrew or English, I didn't understand English. Having no understanding of Hebrew and just using the English translation, what they showed me did sound like it could be Jesus. And time and time again, they used different verses to substantiate their claims. And one by one, I began to understand it, hook, line and sinker. Never once did I ask myself, Julius, what is the Jewish concept of the Messiah? No, because they told me what the concept of the Messiah was, that he was supposed to die for my sins. He was supposed to be buried and resurrected. Did I know that this wasn't the Jewish concept? They showed me in what I thought was the Tanakh, the Old Testament, what these concepts were. To me, it made sense. And slowly, one step at a time, I thought, I'm reading it here in black and white. It's making sense to me. And it came to the point where I said, you know what, I accept this. But it was interesting. I got to the point where I converted. I got to the point where all the evidence they gave me stacked up on this end of the scale. And I said, you know what? I said this in one of the, in the Rosh Hashanah or it was the Yom Kippur service after Ed Brotsky had given this very emotional sermon about Abraham almost ready to offer Isaac up on the altar. Of course, point to the whole idea that God wants human sacrifice or something like that. I was very moved by the sermon and I said to him afterwards, you know, Ed, I really believe this. And he asked me to confess my faith in front of the whole congregation. And I got up in front of the congregation. At that time, it must have been about 25 people. A lot of the men were wearing Kippur at the Yom Kippur, et cetera. And I almost wept over the fact that I'd been forgiven for all my sins. You gotta understand something. I didn't know that Judaism offered an opportunity to be forgiven for your sins. I never knew of the concept. But here I was accepting Jesus, being forgiven for my sins, thinking, ah, I put everything on the line. A nice Jewish boy, I finally put it on the line of accepted Jesus, or as they called him, Yeshua HaMashiach. And now I'm born again. I have eternal life and I've done the right thing. And no sooner do I do that that this pastor said to me in front of the group, Julius, you know it was God that showed you the truth, don't you? Yeah, and you know it was God that took you through this amazing route, brought you through all this trial and tribulation to show you ultimately that Jesus was your Messiah. And Julius, if Jesus isn't the Jewish Messiah, isn't it the most Jewish thing to do to accept him? Sure. Well Julius, you know that God wanted you to be saved and there's nothing more on this earth that the devil wants is for you to deny that faith. And as soon as you start feeling that you have doubts about this faith, you must know that it's Satan himself causing you to doubt. Satan doesn't want you to believe. Needless to say, I walked away from this meeting accepting Jesus and accepting Satan. I walked away with a dual religion here, torn. And I've gone through such an agonizing torment over a year process to come to the point where I believed that J.C. was the Messiah that I had to accept upon myself the bird noso to be tormented by the devil if I was gonna have any doubts. To know that it wasn't my own intelligence that was causing me to doubt. It wasn't my own Yiddish in the Shama that was saying Julius, you're making a big mistake. That I was supposed to think that this was the devil. And this is one of the things that bound me in almost instantly and was very hard for me to let go. You might think Julius, obviously you were a little sick, but no, I think this is one of the things that really has a lot of people hooked in Ryan and Sinker. I think of a lot of Christians today knew that the devil really wasn't real the way that they portrayed him and be a different issue. But this held me in. They saw in me a potential here of being able to help reach a lot of Jewish people. They thought, here's a nice guy who's a successful illustrator, knows how to talk to people friendly. We're gonna use him. Needless to say, I got an opportunity to exercise my musical talents. And I, too, became part of these singing groups that went into the various churches and sang these lovely songs. I became the Public Relations Director for our congregation, and I managed to put on several very controversial events here in Toronto. I managed to get involved in the graphics of a lot of these organizations, helping them promote their missionary wares by doing album covers, et cetera. I was able to speak on radio shows. I was on a television show. I even designed things for these things. I agonized over the little that I did that helped contribute to the evangelization of Jews. So you're saying, so Julius, how come you're here? It's a good question. One of the things they asked me to do was teach Sunday school. And you know, they say, one of the best ways to learn is to teach. And I took the books that were necessary to help me give over the lessons they wanted me to teach. And I studied them every Saturday before the Sunday school. And while I prepared myself to learn a lot and to give over a lot, at the same time, I often found things that really bothered me, that irked me. Contradictions in the Bible, misconceptions in the Bible, mistranslations in the Bible, places in the New Testament where things would be said black one minute and white the next. And all these different problems and variations of what was supposed to be true and wasn't, which in the long run, equalled to the Jewish understanding of what is wrong with Christianity. But I didn't realize at the time that I was finding the Jewish objections. I started seeing so many contradictions and problems that eventually, while I had all these different reasons to believe in Christianity on one hand, that tip the scales in their favor, slowly over many years, these areas of problems in regards to the truth of Christianity began to tip the scales the other way. Problems such as their claim that everything would get prayed in Jesus' name. Prayers weren't answered. I remember I was on a TV show last December in Detroit and the radio announcer, I was there sitting opposite of Jews for Jesus' missionary. And he asked me, Julius, when you were involved, did you pray? And I said, yes. And he said, did you get your prayers answered? And I said, not all the time. I said, see, so you couldn't have been a true believer. I said, wait a minute, this is ridiculous. If you're a true believer, and I ask you to pray about the coin I'm going to ask you to flip and pray that it's going to be heads. Is it going to be heads? 50-50. And if you had said, I'm going to ask you to do it two times and three times. Do you think every time you pray it's going to be heads? No, it's chance. I tried to show them how ridiculous this was. I started seeing that not only did I not have this magical formula to get prayers answered, but I saw that really, my life was no much happier before I was a believer than after, as they would call it. In fact, I saw so many people who were neurotic and sick. I saw one guy kill himself in the congregation. I saw that this is a sick place. And there's a lot of weird people here. And if anything, you know, you're laughing. But there's a lot of neurotic people out there to get attracted to these things. Now, I don't think I was that neurotic. I think I got involved for the right reasons. Really, I think I was using my cup and I was making some sound decisions. In fact, I think I would challenge anybody to sit down with me privately for three, four hours and give me the opportunity to make a case for Jesus. And I think I could have you half convinced because there's some good arguments. On the other hand, I'm gonna ask you to sit down for three hours tomorrow night so we can make a case while he's not and we'll for sure have you convinced. Because, Jewishly, there are far more, there's every reason to not accept them. And these reasons were not clear to me at all until finally I removed myself after accepting all these doubts upon myself and I walked away from this forest to finally take a look at the trees. And I saw that I had given myself an opportunity to make one of my biggest mistakes in my life. Five years of my life I committed to this. When I walked away, I took it easy for a while and then finally a rabbi recommended me recommended to me to go seek some Jewish learning and went to Ashetora, I went to Orsamach. Slowly I started seeing that Judaism wasn't what the Christians painted it out to be. Judaism was a religion filled with a personal relationship with God. The key phrase that they always used to make it think like they got the connection. But Judaism does have that, that personal relationship with God. Judaism gave me the appreciation for the wealth of tradition and heritage we had. The connection with our people, an understanding of our scripture in a way that I'd never experienced before through the Messianic Jewish movement. When I finally moved away and got to the point where I could see what I'd make in a big mistake it was very hard for me to acknowledge it. And I got to the point where I had to say to myself, Jews, you can either keep this a secret for the rest of your life and pretend it never happened or use your big boo boo for good and start speaking out to people and doing something. And it was like a cancer that just kept growing. And what originally started off as an opportunity to speak to a few Jews has led to me here tonight and taking on the responsibility of being director for Jews for Judaism in Toronto. Now a lot of you are here tonight, and let's admit it, you're here because Julius or Claire asked you to. And it's very sad. You don't know how sad I felt sick at the beginning of this evening to see that all I had here were my friends. I'm gonna say, Julius, why should you feel sick? I feel glad that you came, I really did. But what really hurts is we ran ads in the Canadian Jewish news for three weeks. I don't think there were terrible ads. We sent letters to every Hebrew day school teacher in Toronto. We sent letters to every rabbi practically in Toronto, every synagogue, every Jewish social worker. I think I contacted at least 1,000 people. Not to mention the countless Jews who read the Canadian Jewish news ad. And what really hurts is the people that need to hear what's going on here tonight the most aren't here. The comments that Mark Powers made about you obviously not your typical audience, it's true, you're with it. You know what's going on Jewishly, but you are here. Don't ask me why you feel this is an issue. I hope, and I mentioned to a lot of you when I spoke to you, I don't want you to come here for me tonight. I want you to come here because I believe, I want you to believe that there's an issue out here that Jewish people by the hundreds and by the thousands are assimilating from a lot of means. One of them is through the false belief that Jesus is the Messiah. And unless Jews are educated basically to understand how to refute these issues, we're not gonna be able to help the people that are getting directly involved. Maybe none of us know such a person. But we don't know where and when such a person will turn to you. People turn to me because they feel I have the answers. But they can just as easily turn to you. I'm gonna ask, we're gonna have a lot of room for questions and answers at least a little bit. It's getting like it's 10 to 10. I just wanna, I'm sure I missed out on a few points, but the one thing I have to state is a couple of things. Christianity states that the only way you can be saved is to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Otherwise you're gonna go to hell. I'm standing here tonight to show you that in Judaism, God just asked that you admit that you made a boo boo, you return, start doing what's right, forsaking what's wrong and making a commitment to lead a life striving to do what's right and just. This is how God wants Jewish people to return to a personal relationship with him. Tomorrow we're going to be entering into a very intense three hour session. We're going to be dealing with the passages in the Bible that are most often used by missionaries to bring Jewish people to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Please come again tomorrow night for part two and do us and yourselves a favor and try and find an interested friend who will also wanna come. Also, I recommend that any of you who are here in the audience tonight wants to find out a little bit more about how you too can be more Jewish. Please speak to either myself or one of these speakers tonight, we'll help you out. Also, if one of you in the audience are here tonight and you believe in Jesus and you'd like to discuss the issues of why or why not, we believe he is or he is not the Messiah, we'd like to discuss this with you also. We'd also like to ask that anybody who wishes to dove in my reef stay because we bought extra sederim along, we could have a minion after this is all over. I'm gonna ask that I call upon Rabbi Michael Skobak and Mark Powers to join me right now and we're gonna open up for a few minutes for questions and answers because I'm sure there's a lot of different things that wanna be discussed and my apologies for having to keep you sitting for such a long time. I'm gonna start with questions. We have a question over there. Evelyn? Yeah. I'm not sure what she's involved in. It doesn't really have anything to do with some of the mess answers with her. And when I got back and forth and I got up and went through and I got really tired of it. And I knew two were with her and I said, and she told me I was gonna burn hell but I look okay with a tan, I can be a little bit, you know. And I read some of the questions in your booklet about if you have to keep an open mind. So I've tried to keep an open mind with her. I've tried to do a lot of things with her. I don't think she's three or six years old and I don't really think I'm gonna change her mind. What do you do? I mean, sort of keeping an open mind of communication or sense of humor or whatever you wanna call it to deal with something like this when you think there's something like he said. We've had the experience where people involved for five years, for seven years. This summer, a family involved for 12 years in a Hebrew Christian group came back. By closing doors to family members, for sure you're not gonna get them back. By setting ground rules, by saying, look, this is what you believe, I don't. You wanna believe it. I think you're dead wrong but I love you anyhow. And I still wish to keep a relationship with you and keeping that door open, you're giving them a message because you can be sure that whatever group she's involved in, they're loving her like crazy. And if all she hears from you is rejection, what's the message she's getting? The Christians love me, my family and the Jews, they don't. So by keeping that door open on a certain ground rule situation, there is always, and people condemn me for it all the time, I'm an optimist. I can't get away from that fact. I believe that at some point in time, there's going to be something in what she believes that just is not going to click and she's gonna come looking for an answer and if you've kept the door open, she might just come back to you for it. But if you've closed the door on her, she won't. And that's why we say, keep an open mind and keep that door open. Well maybe she'll talk to us this week, what do you think? We have somebody in California. We have somebody in California. We have somebody in New Jersey for a while. We have somebody in New Jersey. Give me another city, I can do. I'm calling something cool, so when I say, what about this, what about this? That's all right. Nobody said that there's any logic involved in this, by the way. Right. Okay, I suggest you take up on Mark's offer for our colleague in LA, because he's very good. Right. Okay, Alan, you had a question? Yes, the question was really to discuss briefly our experiences when we go to these messianic conferences. The reason we go is because we really don't feel that it's appropriate just to sit back and wait for parents to call us crying. And there are conferences which attract hundreds and hundreds of these Hebrew Christians. So we've gone to them over the years and basically we find two reactions. The leadership of these groups are terrified of us. And they've been telling their people over the years never to speak to anyone in Jews for Judaism. These men are evil, they're wicked, they're from the devil, they're the anti-Christ themselves. They will do terrible things, they will brainwash you, they will manipulate you, they will lie to you, they will, people were told that I will tie them up, kidnap them, et cetera. And these are basically desperate measures to keep people away from us. What happens at these conferences though is that the people, the regular people, the members that meet with us and speak with us because they're curious or because they want to convert us or because they just are interested in talking, it's like going to a hotel and instead of having black and white TV, they now have color TV. They get a chance to speak to interesting people. They find that we are very sincere, that we're very knowledgeable, we have answers to their questions, we can ask them many questions that they never thought of. We know the New Testament backwards and forwards. So we find that the regular members, the run-of-the-mill people in Hebrew Christian groups are really fascinated when they hear from knowledgeable Jews. And we find that it begins the process to bring them back to Judaism. And some of the people that we met over these conferences we're still in touch with and we're still working with. Ultimately, what happens is that the reaction of the leaders has to change because now they begin to look ridiculous when they're saying don't talk to these evil, wicked, terrible, neanderthal men who are going to beat you up. So generally we found that it was, I think the consensus was that in our lives it was probably for us one of the most incredible experiences we ever had to be able to speak to hundreds of people over the course of a week and to have incredible impacts on people, to literally turn people's heads around because these are people that are Jewish and that never got a chance to hear our point of view. It's like they went to a trial and they only heard, it's like you go to a trial and you're a defendant and the judge says, okay, let's hear the prosecutor and the prosecutor gives him this case and says, and judge, this is what the defense attorney is gonna say. He's gonna say this, but this is why he's wrong. And judge says you're guilty. And you say, well, even I'm guilty, my lawyer never got a chance to defend me. And the judge says, well, the prosecutor told me everything that you were gonna say. So that's what happened. As people hear about, Judy isn't from the Christians. We started doing this about two years ago. It grew out of a frustration of mine. I lived down the road about 15 minutes from Grantham, Pennsylvania, which is where the Messiah Conference is held every year and has been held every year since the 70s as far as I recall. And I was just generally frustrated over this happening in my backyard and not doing anything about it. So last year I got fed up and I said, what should we do? They rent out the entire college. It's called Messiah College, which is where they get the name Messiah from. It's a Brethren in Christ church-run school. And they take over the whole campus for a week. And we couldn't go on campus. We had gone on campus the year before. I lasted there about 30 seconds. My face is well-known. Two guys come up on one side, two guys on the other side, and I end up off campus and really not accomplishing anything. So last year we decided that we're going to take a truck and there's a spot right at the gates to Messiah College off to the side of the road where there's enough room to park this truck and we did. And we parked this cube van and hung up our Jews for Judaism sign and we stood there from morning till night for the entire week that they were there. And hundreds of people came over and talked to us. And we thought this was a wonderful thing. The leadership did not. They condemned us. They told their people not to come talk to us and so forth. It didn't work, by the way. But we did it again this year. And then we found out that the Union of Messianic Jewish congregations is having their conference in Norfolk, Virginia. And we said, let's go. And so we did. In this particular case, they were having it in a hotel. Gee, hotel is fair ground considering the fact that they didn't rent out the whole hotel. So we booked into the same hotel. In fact, we booked onto the same floor as all their exhibits. And it was a very, very interesting four days that we spent there. There were 1,200 of them and seven of us. And we thought, you know, these were fair odds. Everywhere that they turned, we were there. They ran a singles cruise to tour the Norfolk Harbor. Michael and our director from New Jersey went on the singles cruise. I mean, they didn't know what to do with us. But it did open up avenues of discussion with people and we're carrying on those discussions now. And these are people that we would not have run into necessarily or families would not have come to us necessarily. And they would have gone blissfully about their way without ever being exposed to a Jewish answer. And it was that frustration which led us to this particular program, which Mirza Shem, we will continue to utilize to reach out to people. Okay, David Lenski. Over the years I've read a lot of the reputations of the Christian missioners. What they say, what the answer is. And I think in cults, so to speak, you see two different groups of people that are completely brainwashed and after they are faced with and not with a problem, they'll answer with just a slogan. Like almost like they don't know what to say. And then there's another group, which actually deals with the problem. They speak about it in a more logical way from their side. Now Julius mentioned the guy like Ed Brodsky. I don't know, but I've heard his name mentioned several times. He's one of the big cheeses. I don't understand if these things are, when we look at the back and forth of their arguments, and you look at it in a logical way, you can see how silly and how ridiculous and how many contradictions and misconceptions there are within that. You would think that a supposedly intelligent guy like this guy Ed Brodsky, why hasn't he or somebody in his statute been able to be convinced to get out of this, to rise up to this? Do you know the story of Saul? Nah, you don't know the story of Saul. Let me tell you the story of Saul. Saul's family called the psychiatrist and said, listen, we got a problem. Doctor says, yeah, so what is it? Well, we don't want to tell you about it. We just want to come in. We're having a problem with Saul. Doctor says, okay, bring Saul in. So they come in, Saul comes in, sits down, his mother comes in, his father comes in, and the doctor turns to Saul and he says, so Saul, what's your problem? I don't have any problem. Well then, Saul, why are you here? Well, you don't understand, Doctor. I don't have a problem, but they do. Okay, Saul, what's their problem? Well, they just refuse to believe that I'm dead. Saul, you walked in here. Saul, you're talking to me. What do you mean you're dead? Yeah, I'm dead. Saul, come on, look, you walked in here. How could you be dead? Doc, you just don't understand. That's the reaction after a corpse, for a period of time, after a person dies, a corpse has certain reactions. I mean, after all, if you've ever seen a chicken, where you cut the head off, the body still runs around for a little, but I'm dead. But Saul, you're sitting here, you're breathing. Yeah, but that's just a manifestation of my soul, which hasn't left the body yet, but I'm really dead. And this goes on for an hour, a two hours, three hours. And Saul insists that he's dead. The doctor finally says, listen, I can prove to you that you're not dead. Okay, says Saul, listen. When somebody dies, the heart stops beating, the blood stops pumping. When you take a pin and you stick it into that person who's died, because of that, no blood comes out, right? Saul goes, yeah, that's right. Let's do a little experiment. Give me your hand. Saul sticks out his hand, the doctor takes a pin, sticks it into his hand, and guess what happens? The blood starts running, and Saul looks at it, and he stares at it, and this drop of blood keeps running down, and the doctor says, so, Saul, what do you think? And Saul says, you know, doctor, that's amazing. Dead men do bleed. I had a chance to speak with Ed Brotsky this summer for about an hour, and I'll try and explain in the vein of Mark, really what happens, because you're right, it seems strange that when something is so clear to you, you can't explain it to someone else. You know, Sigmund Freud said that when it comes to self-deception, every man is a genius. And basically, what is happening, and this becomes really the crux of our counseling, when the interaction is debating, it's impossible to ever get someone to see your point of view, because no one ever lost a debate in their life. It's the mode of being a lawyer instead of a judge. And if you can get the person to become a judge, to assume the position of a judge, where they wanna really look at both points of view objectively, and ask you real questions, then you have a chance to get through to them. But if they're maintaining the posture of a lawyer, where their whole purpose in talking with you is to be a lawyer, to defend their position, there was never a court case in the world where the lawyer got up and said, you know, judge, my opponent is right, the district attorney is right, my client's guilty, let's go home. Lawyers never lose their argument. And that really becomes the really crucial point to transform someone from being a lawyer into being a judge. And until we can do that in a counseling situation, or in a discussion situation, nothing will change their mind, because they will always come up with the corpse's bleed routine. Slate over here. Can you deal with these people without having a gift? It just lets you be an Orthodox Jew without having to look into that other thing. I mean, can you talk with them? You know, one of the arguments that we used to get when we were training, she asked us, is it possible to deal with these people without even dealing with the New Testament? And one of the things we were trained as Messianic Jews was to try and convert Jews without using the New Testament. Because their case is that you can prove that JC is the Messiah without the New Testament. And clearly, it is the basis upon which you can take a Jew out. It happens to be also a very good exercise to show what fallacy and what an illogical document it is in the New Testament when you take a look at some of the things that claim to be true and you start pointing out some of the major inconsistencies there exist therein, but you can't do it without it. A lot of times, most of the Jewish people that get involved will finally admit that they did know nothing about, they knew nothing about Judaism. And when you take a look at what the Tanakh says about the Jewish people, about the Jewish faith, about the Jewish people's relationship with God, about the permanence and the existence of Torah forever, a lot of issues that come up in the Torah, when these things are examined, a lot of times this potential convert can be shown the opposite. But I think that one of the problems is, and I don't know if one of the Rabbi or Mark might want to make a statement about it, sometimes going through Bible refutations, joining verses doesn't help. We want to discuss that tomorrow night. That's tomorrow night, yeah. That's really tomorrow night's discussion, so. Real quick answer in part A, yeah, two part question. How many of these people are truly Jewish, halachically Jewish really? Of the figure of 140,000 that I gave you, we believe 140,000 are truly halachically Jewish. I am not counting those that don't fit into a definition of Judaism, kahlachah. How serious is the other part? The, how serious is Jewish, Hebrew Christian day schools, butcher shops, and so forth and so on down the line. You know, I really don't know how to answer that question. Are there many of them? The answer is they're training more. They are growing, they are not receding. They are training more, what do they call it? Covenant, what's the term they say? Covenant surgeons. Covenant surgeons. Yeah, right, they have a day school in the Philadelphia area, halutsim day school which has well over 200 kids in their program. And they're not the only ones. So how dangerous is it? Big time. You had a question behind Jerry there, yeah. During the evening, one of the instruments of converting, getting this group to Nuber is the traditional churches in the United States to invite them into their congregation. What method have you done to stop that? And if you haven't done anything or the methods haven't been that strong, why not? Part of the program, and perhaps what you need to hear is more about Jews for Judaism and what we do, and I'd like to save some of that for tomorrow night, but real quickly, we have an ongoing program of reaching out to church groups and obviously mainstream church groups, and we have received from them a tremendous amount of support for our efforts because they see the deception involved here, and they see that it is no credit whatsoever to Christianity as well as to Judaism. And we have letters, I wouldn't say hundreds of letters, but we have letters from many, many church groups, Protestant, Episcopal, Catholic, but of course the Catholics are not Christians, and so forth and so on that support us in our work, and we do elicit support from these groups. In fact, I'll be speaking in a Lutheran church in three weeks that has had these Jews for Jesus type groups in previously, and one of the members of the Lutheran church spoke to a friend of mine who happens to be in his law firm and said, you know, gee, what a wonderful program this was, and so forth and so on, and my friend said, don't you think you ought to hear from the other side? And so I'll be there in three weeks to give them the other side. Okay, David? While it is true that many Jews who were, where the Christianity were never told to affect the Judaism, nevertheless I find it a disturbing element. The question I wanted to ask, what about the Orthodox around the traditional culture who turns back on Judaism and goes to Christianity? How do we come back this? It really was that we were describing tonight a phenomenon which is basically running rampant among assimilated Jews that don't come from very strong Jewish backgrounds, and the question really was regarding Jews from a Torah background, from an Orthodox background who get involved with these Hebrew Christian groups. I understand the question correctly. That's right. Well, I would say that these groups that are specifically good, I have many of my books with me at the moment, one is your book, which is written in Italian, often actually was the mainstream of Jewish life. And it is shocking what I have read in this manual. When you push up religious, logical answers, and have a more on the question department. And also, you have to actually finish. What I would say just on one foot is that in our experience, and this really speaks for all of us, and over a course of many years, we don't find people that come from strong Orthodox backgrounds that get involved with these groups. We just don't find it. We see sometimes people who went to Orthodox day schools that didn't come from Orthodox families that get involved. That happens occasionally. What I would say is they're making more of an effort now to reach out to Orthodox people. Traditionally, they avoided us. And now they go to Borough Park all the time and they're in Flatbush or I live, and they feel that it's important if they could get, they're one Orthodox rabbi, they'll be very happy. So they do make an effort to reach Orthodox people, but they have not been successful. It has not been a successful venture. To them though, it's worth expending all the energies they do to get one or two. Everyone that is wrong to this group is wrong. Yeah. Regardless of whether they're Orthodox. If you go through your life, joy is supposed to come up. I'm thinking of Christian, what do you offer them? Truth, but greed, but that's not the issue here. OK, I have not had the experience to any great extent. OK, you're going to take it. I'm going to pass it. We'll take it. That's the problem. You know, one of the things that we've seen, if you ever watch Christian television, is that Jesus is called for a number to happen to them. If people have a problem with money, with their marriage, with their children, with drugs, with any problem in the world, if they will take Jesus, the Jesus Pill, is they'll be happy and fine. We don't offer Judaism, is that it? But I was first learning of Yeshua. I started out at the Yeshua University about 16 years ago. One of the students of my class asked me that question. You know, I don't enjoy all this stuff. I don't love doing Mitzvahs all the time. It doesn't make me happy. And the answer was that that's not the purpose of Judaism is to make it happy and to be fine. So we all work for something that's real. Something that's true. And part of our total life is to experience the sin-push of Mitzvah. There is joy in being a Jewish. But we say in our grandmother, we're full and solid reminder that the reward of the joy only comes to invest in the energy and sweat and toil. So we're offering people something that's real, but something that's not easy. We're no real easy answers in life. And we teach people that they should be suspicious of the easy answer of the simple answer. It's a question of instant coffee, instant tea, instant joy. And in an instant, you'll find it's not real. Okay. How many people are there across the United States like yourself? Michael Scowback and everybody at the events of Crabbets in LA are the only full-time people. And Rich Ness, how many? How many organizations are there like you? I don't know. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. He's, uh, he's to be told. Ha ha ha. I'm Jeff. Isn't there, isn't there a job that's being and doing this? No, there isn't. Yes, but they are not exclusively working in this area. I agree, but you can't let your hope just pay on your own like that. Ha ha ha. Excuse me. I can because of this question. His question was how many others are working full-time in this area? You don't even ask the question properly to receive the answer that you want to hear. I'm not making up his questions. Okay. The answer is there are a number of groups. Obviously. Like Yad Lafim in Israel is working, but not on a full-time basis. Uh, Lubavitch, at least two people who are working in this area not on a full-time basis. You go into places like Miami where you have Jews for Jews not on a full-time basis. And so forth and so on across the country. Not on a full-time basis? No. Rabbi Speedak is involved in many, many, many, many, many, many things. In your follow-up and your estimation, how many are Jewish? A. I don't have that many votes. How many are needed? A. How long do they take to bring them so that they can be as indebted as you guys are? And we realize that there's no easy answer to the mission I'm talking about. It's a symptom, obviously, of the greater problem that I'm meeting. And we won't work very closely with the Jewish government organizations because, ultimately, the only answer to the mission I'm talking about is to create a Jewish community that's vibrant, educated, committed, passionate, and immune, if not creative. We cannot, if we're not set up as exclusively an outreach organization. We do a lot of outreach work. But we feel that, ultimately, that's where the issue lies. We are essentially involved in being specialists in the Jewish community. We really need a lot of good GP. We need more good day school teachers, more good rabbi, more cabbage workers. We're the specialists. Jewish education is the key. Typically, rabbi is not trained to do what we do. And the thing that we specialize in doing is intense study of Christianity, of what Christians think, how they think, to be able to affect and communicate with them. When parents call, we are the people in the community that should be referred to. What I would say to answer your question is simply that we would like to see in the Jews and Judaism office in every major Jewish community in the country, in Canada and Israel, all the major Jewish communities. How much money do you have? Anything would help. You have to look at it realistically. Number one, you're talking about you're talking about Parnassa for individuals who are involved in this. And in working for a non-profit organization, as Michael and I do, I was telling you that Parnassa is there, I gave up a kosher catering business to go into this work full-time. I can assure you that I took a major pay cut to do so. And I can also assure you that it was worthwhile. You need expenses to run an office. It means literature, it means mailings, it means somebody working to bring in additional money to keep the office going next month, and so forth and so on. You're talking, unfortunately, it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of $120,000 to $150,000 per year to do the job correctly in each city. That's why, unfortunately, we're running with only three full-time individuals. All the other people who are working in this area are working part-time and for no pay whatsoever. We have three more, I guess. Can you all bear with us a bit longer and then you've got a break, because it's getting very late. I was at the late point, and the TV was gone, and I think it was actually Jim Baker that was on the phone number there in the bottom, so I called the number, and I had just been to, I think it was actually P.M. laughing when they had the answers, the answers to the questions. They all looked in a priest's hand search, and they asked them, this whole thing that you had of... The minister of the priest. The minister of the priest. I'm sorry, I had to choose the term. And I asked them at that time with the idea of 53, and they said, you know, all the answers that we had to the questions, the real messiah that, again, gives you all the answers. My question is, all the religion of Christianity, are all the Christians, all that ignorant, because there seems to be so many problems within Christianity themselves that just can't be Christians. It doesn't make sense. Dead man, duly. Within Christianity, bless him. You all right? In Christianity, we're talking about something that's called the mystery of faith. It doesn't have to make sense because you have to believe. You see, we've had many people come to us and say, listen, Rabbi, listen, Mark, if you would just pray this prayer and accept Jesus into your heart, you would understand. Like that? Okay, we have... You know, look, one approach to your question is to follow you. The only time Christianity becomes a problem that will be a lot for you is when you look at it through Jewish classes. Meaning when we as Jews are asking in front of the Jews of Christianity, we're really being asked the following question, is Christianity consistent with Judaism? The answer is no. But Gentiles and non-Jews abroad as Christians never ask that question. They never have to ask that question. From their own perspective, they will never see, rarely see, the problems that he was as a Jew will see. So the question never becomes kind of a Christian issue. Very quickly, Mark. For those of you that came in, if you didn't register, please see Claire or their program. My name is a lot of people who didn't know us. Please see her to register. Interesting folks will see her on the back. And lastly, we have one more question in the environment. Okay, Kody? It does boil down to a cognitive issue. And I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a few years in the lab, I was working here in Toronto and my boss was telling me that somebody came to church and during a whole presentation on the Passover Sailing in relationship to you know, who, and giving me intelligence that this is really a Jewish interpretation I said to him, excuse me? Anyway, I just realized that I was a very fun musician because if I started to attack a Jew through Jesus I'm talking to somebody who's a Christian and I'm really trying to have a very sensitive brand because it's really attacking his own religion. And it doesn't just happen that you have to defend yourselves before Christians. I mean, do you find that you have that problem and if so, how do you do it? To defend ourselves before Christians really is not an issue. Once we are able to take it and put it into the proper perspective from a Jewish perspective there's nothing wrong with a Christian believing whatever it is he wants to believe. Problem is, when a Jew believes when we sit down and explain to a Christian what is offensive to us as Jews over a program like Christ's in the Passover where there is nothing Jewish about and where there's a distortion of things that we hold sacred and holy they have very little difficulty understanding that concept. When we back it up with the fact that Christian churches have come out and said that there's a tremendous amount of deception involved in what these people are doing and saying where they back us up by saying that you cannot be Jewish and Christian at the same time. It's not a conflict at all. But it needs to be explained on a sensual basis and for example I mentioned it's exactly what I'm going to be doing I'm going there in front of them to tell them that they're wrong and they're going to roast in hell I'm going there to explain to them what is offensive to the Jewish community that was being done by these groups and why it does in their credit to Christianity as well. And that's how we approach it. Okay I have to stop right now because it is getting late Thank you very much for coming. Part 2 is more on me and the Tays That is a force for us. And again it's an old possible traveling a concerned Jewish friend we have to help us and encourage us. That's not necessary. We have some Siddharthen here we'd like to put together a mini-end in the chapel downstairs here in the corner.