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Jews for Jesus spread spiritual message in region
If you’ve been through downtown White Plains lately at midday, you’ve seen them. If you’ve gone through any number of train stations here or subways in the city, they seem to be everywhere. If you live in Rockland County and have a Jewish surname, you’ve probably received mail from them.
They may even knock on your door. Chat you up. Ask you if you’ve thought about Jesus. Then they tell you they’re Jewish, and you know whom you’re talking to.
The summer campaign of Jews for Jesus is under way all right, and the reactions are the same as anytime these most unorthodox missionaries take to the streets: curiosity, befuddlement, indignation and a whole lot of indifference.
But the green-shirted missionaries who have come to New York from across the country and around the world don’t really care. They know they’re provocative. They know they’ll face some resistance in New York, home to the world’s second largest Jewish community, after Israel.
They see only the opportunity to spread a super-controversial, if by now widely familiar, message: that you can be Jewish and for Jesus. They’ll be evangelizing across New York through the end of the month.
“Some people are genuinely interested and some people are — how do I say this politely? — genuinely not interested,” said a smiling Jhan Moskowitz, 57, a Bronx native now living in Skokie, Ill., who helped found Jews for Jesus in San Francisco during the early 1970s.
Moskowitz was standing at Main Street and Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains, beneath the City Center, during a sunny, not-too-hot lunch hour last week. He was handing out cards to a steady stream of passers-by, virtually all of whom continued on their way. Three or four people stopped to figure out who he was. A few offered brief comments, such as “God bless you” and “I’ll stick with Moses.”
“We are offering an invitation to engage in a conversation about who Jesus is,” said Moskowitz, the Midwest director of Jews for Jesus. “I want to talk to Jews about Jesus, but we don’t discriminate against gentiles.”
The cards he was handing out promoted a film about the Middle East that will be shown Wednesday at the White Plains Public Library. Although the small print said Jews for Jesus is sponsoring the film, it didn’t hint at the film’s message — that Israelis and Palestinians will find peace if they find Jesus.
Jews for Jesus is less public in Rockland, but the group has sent DVDs to the county’s many Hasidic homes and mailings to other residents with Jewish surnames. The DVDs tell Jesus’ story in Yiddish.
Susan Perlman, who is in New York from the Jews for Jesus headquarters in San Francisco, said the group has had a good response in Rockland.
“Two percent is pretty good, and we’ve done better,” she said.
The Jewish community’s stated problem with Jews for Jesus has long been not that its members evangelize and promote Christianity, but that they try to turn Jewish heads through misleading marketing — and only then drop their meshuga message.
“If they put up signs that said ‘Jesus is the savior, convert to Christianity today,’ I don’t think anyone would have a problem,” said Scott Hillman, executive director of Jews for Judaism, a Baltimore-based adversary. “But when they use deception and then say, ‘Fulfill your Judaism our way,’ we have a problem.”
Rabbi Velvl Butman, executive director of Chabad Lubavitch of Westchester, said the Jews for Jesus message is nothing more than the latest spin on converting Jews.
“For thousands of years, they’ve been trying to force us to convert,” he said. “What they couldn’t do by force they’re trying to achieve with lies and smiles.”
Rabbi Yaakov Spivak of Monsey, who has confronted Jews for Jesus missionaries since the 1980s, said the group has more influence than people think because of the money it gets from evangelical Christian groups.
“I saw their DVD, and the money it must have cost,” said Spivak, rabbi of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Monsey and dean of the Ayshel Avraham Rabbinical Seminary there. “What makes this really complex is that some big supporters of Israel also support Jews for Jesus. Not all evangelical groups are out to covert Jews, but a lot of them are.”
The Westchester Jewish Conference has simply advised congregations to let its members know that Jews for Jesus events are not Jewish events.
One such event was a Jews for Jesus concert last week at Chase Park in Scarsdale. A group of six performers calling themselves The Liberated Wailing Wall sang praise music in English and Hebrew with mildly Middle Eastern and klezmer inflections.
About a dozen members and supporters of Jews for Jesus, including some Southern Baptists, sat and listened. Most commuters leaving the nearby train station did not pause to watch. At least two locals did stop, including a 20-year-old woman who told a missionary that she was the daughter of a mixed Christian-Jewish marriage and was exploring faith.
Other residents were less friendly. A man holding a toddler and a DVD approached the park, before the child yelled an expletive at a missionary.
Irvington resident Stuart Kolbert, 69, a board member of the Westchester Jewish Conference, stood near the concert with a stack of fliers for the Hillels of Westchester. He said he was not protesting, but offering passers-by a different perspective.
“Jews for Jesus tries to promote themselves as a Jewish group, and their role is to convert Jewish people away from Judaism,” Kolbert said. “I want other people who come here to know that there is nothing Jewish about them.”
Jews for Jesus, not surprisingly, disagrees. Its members say a person can be Jewish and Christian by being Jewish and accepting Jesus as the Jewish messiah.
“Success is telling the message,” said Amer Olson, 38, from Chicago, whose mother is Jewish and who is leading about a dozen missionaries in Westchester. “Jesus was alone on the cross, and may not have looked successful. But he was.”
Olson, wearing a hat that said “Jesus made me kosher,” then turned and handed out another card.
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