A BRIEF LIST OF MOST FAMOUS MESSIANIC JEWS
· ABU’L FARAJ, Gregory , also called BAR-HEBRAEUS(1226-1286) born in Melitena, son of the Aaron the Jewish physician who cured Saurnavinus, a Tartar general from a disease. Master of Greek, Syriac and Arabic, student of philosophy, theology and medicine, he became an Anchorite in Antioch and ordained Bishop of Gubos at the age of twenty by Mar Ignatius, Patriarch of Saba, then again Maphrian of the Eastern Church at forty. From then on, he was known as Bar-Hebraeus. As bishop of the West Syrian Jacobite church, he was renowned for his justice, integrity, great learning and cosmopolian leadership. His writings span a wide sphere including commentaries on Scripture, moral treatises (Ethikon), on commerce, science, astronomy, medicine, logic, philosophy, history, poetry, humorous fables and devotions. While clear and resolute on matters of church doctrine, he shunned ecclesiastical disputes as an abomination. "During his forty years' episcopate he was never known to have received a farthing from anyone …like Paul, he sought to be chargeable to no man and therefore supported himself by his own scholastic ability, giving his labors freely to the cause he loved. Churches were erected wherever he went. Even the Mohammedan body who would be naturally opposed to his belief held him in great respect. At his death, none were found in the Jacobite church to equal his spiritual stature. He was appropriately named Abu'l Faraj, meaning "father of comfort."
· ADLER, Mortimer, author of numerous books on philosophical topics, becomes a Christian in 1986 at age 84. A long-time professor at the University of Chicago, he pushes for a "great books" and "great ideas" curriculum and writes semi-popular works such as How to Read a Book (1940), The Common Sense of Politics (1971), and Six Great Ideas (1981). He writes an autobiography in 1977, Philosopher at Large, but writes another 15 years later (A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large) that explains his conversion to Christianity. "We have a logical, consistent faith," he says. "In fact, I believe Christianity is the only logical, consistent faith in the world." But that doesn't mean that Christianity is without mystery. Adler asks, "What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible then it would be just another philosophy."
· ALEXANDER, Michael Solomon (1799-?), German rabbi baptized in 1825 after concluding that rabbis had concealed the truth about Jesus; seven years later he becomes Professor of Hebrew and Rabbinical Literature at King's College, London. He translated the Anglican liturgy into Hebrew, headed a list of sixty Messianic Jews who lodged a formal protest against the Blood Libel His name comes first on the long list of those who signed a "protest of Jewish Christians in England" against the accusation that Jews used Christian blood in Passover rites. When the British Parliament endows the position of Bishop of Jerusalem, the appointment goes to Alexander; in Jerusalem, he opens both an institution for the training of Jewish Christian missionaries and a hospital for poor, sick Jews. Thirty-one Messianic Jews honored him at his funeral in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century.
· ALON, Gil. Israeli-born (Sabra) Jewish seeker of enlightenment became a student of Oriental philosophy and acupuncture. He found Messiah at last. His testimony is available at: http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/Gill%20Alon.htm
· ANACLETUS II, Pope, formerly Petrus, Cardinal PIERLEON (?-1138),wasfrom a famous Italian Jewish Christian family.
· ANGEL, Bernhard (1860-1929) born in Bucharest, Romania, went to Jewish Seminary in Hanover, Germany, traveled to the United States, and married a Catholic wife whom he met in transit. They both agreed to keep their faiths separate, but when a Christian missionary visited her after an illness, she accepted Christ as her personal savior and began to share a faith with her husband. At first reluctant, he soon found all his questions answered by investigating the Scriptures with A.F. Schauffler, an English pastor. Baptized, in 1887, he became a Chicago Seminary student, then Superintendent of the Chicago Hebrew Mission and later worked with the New York City Mission Society for thirty years, reaching out to the Jews there.
· AUGUSTI, Friedrich Albrecht . A learned Jewish convert (early 18 th century)
· BARON, Andrew Mark . Aerospace engineer Andrew, raised in Conservative Judaism, comes to faith in Christ in 1982. He writes that in college "I believed God existed because of the phenomenal order to the universe, yet I felt human beings were far too miniscule for His notice." Reading the New Testament helps him to see that God "constructed us with souls that can be fed only by His own hand. Believing God cares is not intellectual suicide; believing that He doesn't care is spiritual starvation."
· BARON, David (1855-1926) David Baron and his Hungarian friend C.A.Schonberger found the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel in London in 1893.Born from a Russian family in Poland, David studied the Talmud and was told that Jesus was a liar and charlatan, but after emigrating to England he read the New Testament for himself, became a missionary to his own people and also to British church leaders, whom he often finds to be ignorant of the Old Testament and thus presenting a shallow gospel. He edited the Scattered Nation, wrote The Visions and Prophecies of Zecharia , The Shepherd of Israel, The Servant of Jehovah, Anglo-Israelism Examined, and The History of Israel. When the Zionist Congress began in a rented casino in Basle, Switzerland, David attended. Timing his continental tours to include the annual conference in his itinerary each year, as a reporter David obtained a permit to sit in with the delegates. He personally knew Theodor Herzl, the visionary and chairman of the congress. At one conference, a delegate stood and began to vent his spleen on Christian Jewish missionaries. Herzl's response was to quietly leave the rostrum and come down and seat himself by the side of Mr. Baron and a few of his fellow missionaries. In 1911, he used the term ‘Messianic movement’ to describe a belief among Hebrew Christians that: “It is incumbent on Hebrew Christians, in order to keep up their "national continuity," not only to identify themselves with their unbelieving Jewish brethren, in their national aspirations—as expressed, for instance, in Zionism and other movements which aim at creating and fostering "the national idea" and regaining possession of Palestine—but to observe the "national" rites and customs of the Jews, such as the keeping of the Sabbath, circumcision, and other observances, some of which have not even their origin in the law of Moses, but are part of that unbearable yoke which was laid on the neck of our people by the Rabbis.” He disagreed with this "rather grand-sounding designation [which] does not describe any movement of Jews in the direction of recognizing our Lord Jesus Christ as the Messiah, but an agitation on the part of some Hebrew Christian brethren, who have evidently yet much to learn as to the true character of their high calling of God in Christ Jesus, supported by a few no doubt well-meaning excellent Gentile Christian friends, who…do not understand the real tendency of this 'movement'." Messianic congregations have multiplied throughout the earth, and his negative judgment may have been too hasty, but his warnings have merit in view of some heretic fringes of the Messianic movement which at times de-emphasize Yeshua’s central role and Divine sonship. His life is at http://www.senac.com/nb/1627/bin/293.html and testimony at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/David%20Baron.htm
· BEHR-SIGEL, Elizabeth (1907-) born of a Protestant father and Jewish mother in Strasbourg, France, she was among the first women to be admitted to the theology faculty at the University of Strasbourg in 1926. She continued her studies in Berlin and Paris where she first encountered the Orthodox Church and was received in it by Fr Lev Gillet. She became close friends of Russian Orthodox clergy Sergius Bulgakov, Nicolas Berdiaev, Mother Maria Skobotsova and lay theologians, Paul Evdokimov and Vladimir Lossky. She was allowed to officiate as a lay pastoral officiate during WWII due to a severe shortage of clergy. She published essays on the Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition and did her doctorate on 19 th century Russian theologian Alexander Bukharev. Commenting on Gal 3:27, “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freemen; male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”, she wrote, “This proclamation of Paul, which does not abolish the differences but does away with all the contempt and enmity that may exist between them, has resounded through the centuries… But you will ask, what about the empirical realities in our so-called Christians societies and nations? As Orthodox Christians, together with other baptized Christians, we cannot but confess, collectively and individually, our infidelity to the ‘celestial vision’. This is the tragedy of our historical existence that is not yet transfigured by the light of Christ, though already recipient of the first fruits of the new life.”
· BEN MEIR, Moshe Yimanuel. Orthodox Israeli whose journey in faith to Yeshua at the beginning of the at the beginning of the twentieth century is told in his autobiography From Jerusalem to Jerusalem (http://www.netivyah.org.il/Store/Netivyah%20Store.htm). He is one of the pioneers of the Messianic Jewish movement in Israel.
· BERGSON, Henri. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. The French philosopher is initially influenced by mechanistic writers like Spencer, Mill, and Darwin, but breaks away in books like An Introduction to Metaphysics (which develops a theory of knowledge in which intuition is key) and Creative Evolution (which concludes that Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain life's expansiveness and creativity). During the 1920s Bergson becomes a Christian, and in his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, describes Judeo-Christian understanding as the culmination of human social evolution. In 1937 he explains that his reflections led him to Christianity, "in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism," but he was reluctant to convert because he was foreseeing "the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to sweep over the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted."
· BETTELHEIM, Dr. Bernard , (Orthodox Hungarian Jew and linguist, 1811-1870) was a physician, teacher and translator of parts of the Bible in Chinese and Japanese.
· BIESENTHAL, Joachim Heinrich Raphael begins 37 years of missionary work to German Jews in 1844. He uses the knowledge gained in Talmudic academies and while earning a doctorate at the University of Berlin to write commentaries on many New Testament books as well as a History of the Christian Church that shows the Jewishness of the early church.
· BIRNBAUM, Solomon was appointed director of the Jewish Mission Course at Moody Bible Institute, in the Fall of 1922. He did the pioneering work for training missionary volunteers for the Chicago Hebrew Mission and the American Board of Missions to the Jews. The Moody Bible Institute considered the program of Jewish evangelism to be an integral part of its mission and took pride in it. In the early 1930s, the Institute advertised the program proudly in its bulletin, featuring a photo of Solomon Birnbaum, the professor of Jewish evangelization, with the twenty students who were enrolled in the department at the time. The photograph was accompanied by a short paragraph entitled “Debt to the Jew”: “The Jewish nation gave to the world the Messiah, and yet that nation remains blind to the glorious fact that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed He of whom the prophets wrote. The Moody Bible Institute has formally recognized, by the maintenance of a Jewish Missions Course, the debt that the Christian world owes to the Jewish race. Christian Jews, and such Gentile Christians as desire training for introducing Christ to the 'lost sheep of the house of Israel,' are in the course instructed in a number of subjects additional to the regular subjects of the General Course.” The Jewish missions program continued at the MBI throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s with little change. In addition to the general course (the basic curriculum for all students) and Jewish studies, the school added an additional course of studies of English for newly arrived immigrant students. The studies at the Moody Bible Institute not only gave prospective missionaries a good preparation for a career of spreading the Christian message among the Jews but also enabled them to become acquainted with the evangelical world. In 1940, Solomon was succeeded in this role by Max Reich, while he became a full-time missionary with the ABMJ.
· BLOCK David, Dr. A professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy in South Africa, became a believer in Christ. He wrote, "I'd listen in shul as the rabbis expounded how God was a personal God and how God would speak to Moses, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and wonder how I fit into all of it. And by the time I entered university I became concerned over the fact that I had no assurance that God was indeed a personal God.... Where was the personality and the vibrancy of a God who could speak to David Block? If God is truly God, I reasoned, then why had he suddenly changed his character?" A Christian colleague told Block that a minister would be able to answer his questions; he reported, "My parents had taught me to seek answers where they may be found, and so I consented to meet with this Christian minister. [He] read to me from the New Testament book of Romans where Paul says that Y'shua (Jesus) is a stumbling block to Jewish people, but that those who would believe in Y'shua would never be ashamed. Suddenly it all became very clear to me: Y'shua had fulfilled the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as where the Messiah would be born and how he was to die.... I knew that Jesus was the Messiah and is the Messiah. And I surrendered my heart and my soul to Him that day." He concluded, "It might seem strange to some that a scientist and a Jew could come to faith in Jesus. But faith is never a leap into the dark. It is always based on evidence. That was how my whole search for God began. I looked through my telescope at Saturn and said to myself, Isn't there a great God out there? The logical next step was to want to meet this Designer face-to-face." See more at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/block.htm
· BOHR, Niels. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on atomic structure in 1922. Born of a Christian father and a Jewish mother, he affirms Christianity but also becomes known for semi-enigmatic sentences such as, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question." In 1939 he visits the United States and spreads the news that German scientists are working on splitting the atom. The United States responds with the Manhattan Project, from which the atomic bomb emerges. In 1942 he escapes from German-occupied Denmark via a fishing boat to Sweden, and leaves there by traveling in the empty bomb rack of a British military plane. He makes it to the United States and works on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
· BRONSTEIN, David. Trained while a student at the Chicago Hebrew Mission, later became the director of Peniel Community Center, working under the Presbyterian Board of National Missions to the Jews. He wrote Peniel Portrait in 1943, a memoir of his work there. The Center's compassionate conservatism includes sponsorship of after-school programs, athletic competitions, summer camps, Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, parties for mothers, English and citizenship classes, and discussions of religious topics.
· BURGOS, Abner of see HALEVI, Solomon, Rabbi, Archbishop of Burgos
· BUSKIN, Norman. A Michigan policeman who comes to believe in Christ while working as security at a Billy Graham rally in 1976: "I told my partner what had happened, and he loaned me a Bible. I drove home in tears and with one thought on my mind: Jesus! Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and I was determined to investigate what that should mean to me." Buskin begins reading the Gospels: "'Here it comes,' I thought, 'swell stories about popes, assorted saints and Roman burial sites.' I was amazed to find that all the main characters in this book were Jewish." He becames a policeman in Davie, Fla., where four other Jewish policemen also embraced Jesus as the Messiah.
· CAPPADOSE, Abraham a descendent of Portuguese Jews who escaped persecution to Holland, he became acquainted with Christ as His savior upon reading Isaiah 53. He was part of the Dutch circle of Isaac Da Costa, a friend from early childhood and became a doctor.
· CASPARI, Karl Paul (1814-1892) began to teach in 1847 as professor of theology at Christiana, Norway. Carl Caspari was born of Jewish parents in Dassau, Germany, in 1814. As a young man he studied Hebrew and Arabic at the university of Leipzig, producing an Arabic grammar which for many years was the standard work in its field. While at the university, he was powerfully confronted with the claims of Jesus Christ as both Lord and Messiah. Caspari found the evidence irrefutable: in 1838, on the day of Pentecost, he was formally baptized and took on the baptismal name of Paul. Caspari continued his studies in Berlin until the year 1847, when he was urged by Gisle Johnson, a visiting young scholar from Norway, to apply for a vacant chair as lecturer at the University of Oslo. He did so, was appointed, and spent the rest of his life as a lecturer and professor of the Old Testament. In 1861, Carl Paul Caspari became the first chairman of the Committee for the Mission among the Jews, which had been established in Oslo that year. Caspari’s work as a scholar and a believing Jew served to enrich three generations of Norwegian pastors, bringing the Psalms and Prophets to light in a fresh, dynamic way. His pioneering research into the history of the early Christian Creeds virtually established this specialized field of research as a new discipline. It is in his honor that the Caspari Center for Biblical & Jewish Studies was named in Jerusalem in 1982 (http://www.caspari.com/).
· CASSEL, Paulus Selig (1821-1892), German writer, Orientalist, professor and pastor. He became a member of the Prussian Parliament while preaching to large audiences of Jews and Christians. His greatest achievement was breaking down the prejudice of educated German Jews against Christianity, Christian missionaries to the Jews and against Hebrew Christians. He also became a champion of equal rights for Jews and against virulent attacks from the antisemitic party. In 1849, he becomes a conservative Berlin journalist and soon editor of the influential Erfurt Zeitung. Realizing that political differences often have religious roots, he starts exploring the connection of Christianity and conservatism. In the course of his research he studies the New Testament and becomes a believer in Christ. He is a popular writer and lecturer, as a biographer notes: "He liked to arouse curiosity by announcing [lectures] under peculiar titles; but he always endeavored, no matter what his subject might be, to lead his heroes from it to Christ. [He] gave to many, both Jews and Christians, the first impulse towards serious thought, which brought them in the end to the knowledge of the Savior." Elected to the Prussian parliament, Cassel later serves as a pastor, and develops a vision of how to be most effective that differs from the conventional. He writes that evangelizing visits to Jews are of little use: "Public lectures were much more to be depended on; and these must not obtrude their missionary character, but must be of a kind to interest Jews and Christians alike.... Tracts must be written on subjects connected with all departments of life, in order to bring the Jew by various paths to face the one great question." Cassel in the 1870s and 1880s defends Jews against anti-Semitic attacks, and even the Jewish Chronicle, normally critical of converts, reports that "a genius like Cassel is always an honor to his former brethren in the faith."
· CHALMERS, Thomas M. First trained at theChicago Hebrew Mission, he was ordained pastor and later became the missionary director of the New York Jewish Mission.
· CERULLO, Morrisspent his early childhood in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage, but converted in 1961 and organized Morris Cerullo World Evangelism, headquartered in San Diego.
· CHRIST, Jesus see Yeshua
· CHRISTFELSS, Phillip Ernst(formerly Mordechai ben Shemaya) in the wake of the 17 th century Shabbatai Zvi debacle, converts to the "true Messiah, Jesus."
· CHRISTIAN, Paul (Malachi ben Samuel), a Polish rabbi, converts in 1621 several years after being impressed by a Yiddish translation of the New Testament. He is particularly surprised that marginal references to the Hebrew Scriptures are not distorted, as he had been told they would be. He writes, "My heart became full of doubt. No man can believe the pain and ache that assailed my heart. I had no rest day or night.... What should I do? To whom should I speak of these things?" He finally feels he has no choice but to cross over.
· CHRISTIANI, Friedrich Albrecht is stunned to find himself believing in Christ in 1666. The Hamburg resident, educated in the Talmud, says, "I was so zealous for my Jewishness that had someone told me then of my prospective conversion, it would have appeared as strange to me as it seems incredible to others." But finding himself unable to refute Esdras Edzard's arguments, he decides to go with what his mind, rather than tradition, tells him, and takes the last name "Christiani."
· COHEN Hermann (1821-1871) of Hamburg, Germany, pianist virtuoso Franz Liszt’s favorite pupil followed a dissipate life in the gaiety of Paris. At the age of 26 in May 1847 the idea to become Catholic dawned after experiencing a strange agitation and compulsion to bend towards the ground during communion at the Sainte-Valère Church in Paris. Attending mass produced an interior joy that absorbed all his faculties. Eventually, he was overwhelmed with repentance for his dissolute life, and placed himself under Father Legrand who connected him with Father Theodor Ratisbonne. He was baptised at the chapel of Our Lady of Zion in 1947, spent the next two years paying off his debts. In July, 1849 he entered the Monastery of the Order of Mount Carmel, where he became known as Father Augustine Mary, a famous preacher throughout Europe from 1852 until his death. [ read more] at http://www.clairval.com/lettres/lettre_1.cgi?id=2290801
· COHN, Leopold, (1862-1937) a Hungarian rabbi, comes to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. An outraged Jewish community forces him to flee, so he studies at divinity school in Scotland, emigrates to the United States in 1892 with his family, and opens a storefront classroom/church in a heavily Jewish section of Brooklyn. On weekday evenings Cohn provides free English lessons, using the New Testament as a text; on weekends he preaches. Later he opens a medical clinic and a kosher food kitchen, and delivers free coal to the Jewish poor, telling each person he helps, "Receive this in the name of Jesus." He also opens a sewing school at which over 200 girls and their parents hear about Christ, with many coming to believe. in 1894, he founded the Brownsville Mission to the Jews later continued as Chosen People Ministries. The work was continued by his son Joseph Hoffman Cohn (1886-1953).
· COMPIEGNE De VEIL, Ludwig.A learned Jewish convert (early 18 th century)
· COURNOS, John (Orthodox Jew born in Czarist Russia) was a novelist, playwright and poet who included in his biography An Open Letter to Jews and Christians, “To be a true Jew is to be a Messianic Jew. To be a true Christian is to recognize the Jewishness of Christianity. The fate of Judaism and Christianity hangs together…I know a number of Jews who believe as I do, who believe that it is time that we Jews reclaimed Jesus, and that it is desirable that we should do so.”
· DA COSTA, Isaac, (1798-1860) descendant of the famous Jewish hero and Martyr Uriel Acosta, he is considered the greatest poet of Holland next to Bilderdijk. Baptized in 1822 in the Protestant Reformed Calvinist faith with his wife Hannah, and his friend Abraham Capadose, a leading physician. He became a leading figure in the Réveil Movement, a noted scholar, theologian and historian as evidenced in his work Israel and the Gentiles published in 1855.; da Costa's short book, Accusations Again the Spirit of the Century, attacks the rationalistic materialism that is coming to dominate Holland and demands that Christ again become the center of national life. Da Costa writes often of Christ and also his Jewish heritage: "In the midst of the contempt and dislike of the world for the name of Jew I have ever gloried in it." The Jewish Encyclopedia comments about him, "His character, no less than his genius, was respected by his contemporaries. To the end of his life he felt only reverence and love for his former co-religionists."
· DAVIDMAN, Joy Gresham meets C.S. Lewis at Oxford in 1952. She comes to Christianity from a Jewish background after years in Marxism; he comes to love from an academic background after decades as a bachelor. They marry in a registry office in 1956 and again at her bedside in 1957, this time with a clergyman presiding; she is suffering from cancer, and after a period of remission dies in 1960.
· DELITZSCH, Franz (1813-1890) Jewish scholar who translated the New Testament in Hebrew (now available online at http://www.kirjasilta.net/ha-berit/) and wrote a multi-volume commentary known as the Keil and Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament now available from BibleSoft in CD Rom at http://www.biblesoft.com/products/addons/keildelib00220.htm
· DISRAELI, Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield (1804-1881), British stateman and writer, was elected Prime Minister of Britain in 1868. Both the Conservative Party leader and the author of popular novels such as Sybil, emphasizes Christianity's dependence on Judaism: "In all church discussions we are apt to forget the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement. Jesus came to complete the 'law and the prophets.' Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing. Christianity is incomprehensible without Judaism, as Judaism is incomplete without Christianity." He hopes that Jews "will accept the whole of their religion instead of only the half of it, as they gradually grow more familiar with the true history and character of the New Testament."
· DUFF-FORBES, Lawrence (Zvi Ben Abraham), an Australian Jewish Christian and renowned scholar of Scripture. He pastured the Kehilaat HaMachiach Betoch Israel, in Whittier, CA. He also created a radio ministry in California called “Treasures from Tenach” and wrote numerous books to bridge the gap between Judaism and Christianity. His delight was to make the gospel easy to understand in Jewish terms within the larger context of God’s purposes for Israel through Jewish history. For example, here is an excerpt of a conversation he had on a plane with David, a Jew making aliyah:
“D - God is in history?
Z - Of course. How can you ask such a question? God's providence can be detected in history. Permissive, directive and overruling, but always advancing to the ultimate goal when 'the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea'.
D. - Sure it's not wishful thinking? What of the wars and the gas-chambers?
Z - I know . My heart aches with yours. I can never forget. Yet God even overrules wars and gas-chambers to produce effects to advance his ultimate beneficent purposes.
D. - Hard to see...
Z. - That's because you view the events at too close a range. History is like a master's canvas. You must take the long range view of it to capture the true picture in correct perspective.
D. What's the correct perspective on wars and gas-chambers?
Z. - Hateful and ghastly-yet it is due to wars and gas-chambers that you are now in this plane en route to the new nation of Israel for permanent residence there.
D. - Explain, please.
Z. World War One prepared the LAND for the people by the issue of the Balfour Declaration and the events which followed.
D. -Yes, I think I see that clearly. And World War Number Two?
Z. - World War Number Two prepared the PEOPLE for the land...Without world War Number One the LAND would probably not have been returned to the people, and without World War Number Two, the PEOPLE would probably not have been so determined to return to the land...”
(Duff-Forbes, Lawrence. Out of the clouds. Whittier, CA: The author, 1957.) He is credited for popularizing the term Messianic Judaism in the midst 20 th century.
· DUSHAW, Amos, after studying at Union Theological Seminary, writes Proselytes of the Ghetto in 1909, a novel that depicts the difficulty for Jews of embracing Christianity. He writes two other novels: When Mr. Thompson Got to Heaven and The Rivals: A Tragedy of the New York Ghetto.
· EDZARD, Esdras (1629-1708) Hegrew up studying Hebrew and the Talmud, and then studied in Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Basel, earns a doctorate in 1656 and begins working among the Jews of Hamburg. He provided free instruction in Hebrew, helped the poor, and explained to all the gospel. From 1671 to 1708, Edzard led 148 Jews to baptism in his church. He emphasized post-baptismal teaching and counseling, and almost all of those baptized persevered in faith. During his fifty years as a Jewish missionary among the Jews of Hamburg, he was called “a veritable apostle to the children of Israel. He left a sum of money for the benefit of proselytes and Jews, which fund still had its beneficiaries in the 19 th century.
· EINSPRUCH, Henry (Austrian Jew) translated the NT into Yiddish, connected with the Chicago Hebrew Mission and became the Superintendent of the Salem Hebrew Lutheran Mission of Baltimore, MD.
· ELDERSHEIM, Alfred, (1825-1889), Orthodox Austrian Jew, settled in Scotland as a minister. He is remembered as an eminent scholar, a voluminous writer and remains unrivalled in his contributions to the knowledge of Jewish life and customs of the times of Jesus the Messiah.
He finished in 1883 seven years of writing The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, which becomes a standard work. Born in Austria, he serves as a Presbyterian minister in Scotland and a lecturer/preacher at Oxford, with his most productive time spent (as he writes in the preface to his masterwork) "in a remote country parish, entirely isolated from all social intercourse." He notes that "if any point seemed not clear to my own mind, or required protracted investigation, I could give days of undisturbed work to what to others might seem perhaps secondary, but was all-important to me."
· ELIAKIM, Ephraim Ben-Joseph, also called Haham Ephraim, a rabbi in Tiberias, Palestine, who after studying biblical prophecies believed that Jesus is the Messiah. Eliakim underwent tremendous harassment from his former colleagues. He awakened some other rabbis in Jerusalem where he died and was buried next to another brother in Messiah, of Arabic race (30 th August 1930) in Jerusalem. One reporter noted that "Jew and Arab were laid one beside the other, and Jews and Arabs were standing with bowed heads by the two open graves, touched and softened the one toward the others."
· EPIPHANIUS(303 AD-403 AD), bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, trained early in monastic circlescombats nearly 80 Jewish and Christian heresies in his Panarion, among them the Gnostics of Egypt and the Ebionites. In 394 AD, he denounced the use of images painted on a cloth in a church in Jerusalem. When Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria out of jealousy tried to embroil him in discrediting John Chrysostom, the popular Bishop of Constantinople, he refused to press charges which could not be proven and left, charging the proceedings of the court as hypocrisy.
· EUODIUS appointed A.D. 53 in the time of Claudius Caesar by Apostle Peter as bishop of Antioch until his martyrdom in A.D. 68.
· EVARISTUS martyr and bishop of Rome circa 100 AD (Liber Pontificalis).
· FELIX, John (Seelig Bunzlau), a revered German rabbi, announces in the synagogue that he is converting, and makes a dramatic exit by coach (1758).
· FOLDES, Lawrence David. Jewish filmmaker who produces and directs films with Christian values. His Christian faith was inherited through his dad’s vow to a righteous Gentile: “During World War II in Hungary, most of the family was killed—most of them were sent to Auschwitz. My mother survived in the underground in Budapest during the war because she dyed her hair blonde and she wore a big wooden cross whenever she would come out to get food. My father was captured and put into a work camp. All the workers had to wear different colored stars, the yellow star if you were Jewish, and a different colored star if one parent was Jewish and one was not. One day my father's star came off, and at the end of that day, the soldiers came and put all the prisoners into a pure Jewish group, half-Jewish and so forth. My father stepped into the pure Jewish group, and a half-Jewish person he had befriended noticed that my father's star was gone. At the last second he pulled my father out of the Jewish group and put him into the half-Jewish group. The people in the pure Jewish group were all killed, but my father survived. He eventually escaped back to Budapest. My grandfather was trying to get papers to get the family out of the country, to get false papers to be able to get out. He went from church to church asking the priests and ministers if they would give him Christian papers, and none of them did—except for one Lutheran minister, who gave these papers to my father and said, "If you survive, there's only one thing that I ask—that you convert to Christianity." They did survive the war, and then communism came in. During the communist period and the uprising in 1956, my parents and grandfather escaped and came out to the U.S. Everybody in my family changed to Christianity at the time because my father said, "I made a promise, and I'm going to keep my word." He's kept it to this day.
· FRANK, Arnold, ordained in 1884 as a Presbyterian minister, serves in 1934 his 50th year as a missionary to Jews in Hamburg, Germany. During that time he establishes not only a thriving church but a clinic, hospital, home for the elderly, and a retreat center. Following the ascent of the Nazis he advises Jews to leave and points out that Jewish Christians in Germany are considered Jews by Nazis, traitors by Jews, and dangers by gentile Christians. He is arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 but eventually allowed to leave for London.
· FREY, Joseph Samuel Christian Frederick(1771-1837), a former Hebrew teacher, cantor and shochet of Germany, was baptized in the Lutheran Church in 1798, joined the United Brethren then the non-denominational Berlin Missionary Seminary. He organized the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews as well as the London Jews Society in 1808. He later came to the United States and continues missionary efforts. He was ordained in 1818 as a Presbyterian minister. Finally he was immersed as a Baptist in 1827. His experience is representative of the discomfort Jewish believers often felt with finding a fit in the denominationally split Church. He was later involved in a resettlement project of European Jewish Christians in America as farmers called the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews (ASMCJ). The first American immigrant and ASMCJ worker David C. Jadownicky completed his college education, enrolled in a seminary and left the ASMCJ to work as a missionary in Jerusalem.
· GANZ, Richard.A brilliant psychoanalyst who saw Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures. See his testimony at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/richganz.htm
· GARTENHAUS, Jacob. From Austria, employed by the Chicago Hebrew Mission while a student at the Moody Bible Institute, went to the Southern Baptist Seminary, Lousville, KY. He became director of the Jewish Department of the Southern Baptist Convention's Home Mission Board in 1921. The SBC abolishes its Jewish Department in 1949, but Gartenhaus perseveres with his work. Talmudic scholar Max Reich combats anti-Jewish propaganda, writing that "the so-called 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' was one of the basest forgeries ever fathered on the Jewish people. Jewish believers [in Christ] will stand by their slandered nation at this time.... Jewish believers utterly detest the ... unscrupulous Jew-haters, who remain anonymous, bent on stirring up racial strife and religious bigotry."
· GEFFIN, Sarah. A British Jewish New Ager and potter, Sarah allowed the Master Potter to reshape her... She is now a missionary in St. Petersburg. Her testimony is available at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/SarahGeffin.htm
· GERSON, Christian, a German pawnbroker, in 1600 reads out of "curiosity" a New Testament one of his customers was pawning. Seeing that the New Testament relies heavily on the Hebrew Bible, he repeatedly reads his new book "in secret so that my wife should not notice ... my heart was troubled and anxious for weeks, food or drink had no taste for me." Gerson feels he must convert and does so, but at a heavy cost: "My wife, with whom I had lived in marriage, with love and fidelity, and with whom I had two sons, I left at her request ... all my Jewish neighbors and acquaintances ... have become implacable enemies."
· GINSBURG, Christian David, (1821-) British theologian
· GINSBURG, Solomon L. (Orthodox Polish Jew), became a missionary and left an indelible mark worthy of the book of Acts as he faced murderous mobs in Brazil with the Gospel of Messiah… until he died in 1927. One day, Solomon began reading chapter 53 of Isaiah. "Who is this talking about?" he asked his rabbi father. To his surprise, his father snatched the scroll from his hand and slapped his face. Later, without consulting him, Solomon's father arranged his son's marriage with a twelve-year-old girl. Her wealthy parents would support Solomon for seven years while he, too, studied to become a rabbi. Fifteen-year-old Solomon rebelled at this commercial arrangement. Fleeing home, he made his way to London, where he worked for an uncle. There a Christian Jew invited him to a gospel meeting, promising to explain Isaiah 53. Intrigued, Solomon went and heard the prophecy of Christ's crucifixion explained. Thrown out of his home, he resisted family enticements and promises of money, becoming a notable evangelist to Brazil instead. He was beaten many times, but always rejoiced that he could suffer for Jesus. The converted Jew also escaped several assassination attempts, winning his would-be killers to Christ by kindness and godly speech. Thousands were converted under his faithful ministry.
· GITLIN, Moses First trained at theChicago Hebrew Mission, he later became Principal of the Radost Bible School in Poland.
· GITTEL, Immanuel First trained at theChicago Hebrew Mission, he later took charge of the Hebrew Community Center, a branch of the Presbyterian Board of National Mission in Los Angeles.
· GOLDBERG, Louis, a California-born engineer, becomes professor of Jewish evangelization at Moody Bible Institute in 1965. Over the years he argues that new groups such as Jews for Jesus should be accepted by evangelists.
· GOOTFRIED, Johann Adam. A learned Jewish convert (early 18 th century)
· HALEVI, Solomon, Rabbi, Archbishop of Burgos(1351-1445), a respected physician. After reading Thomas Aquinas’ treatise De Legibus, examined the Messianic prophecies of the OT and the Pauline Epistles of the NT. He was baptized at the age of 31 and then studied theology. He was renamed Pablo de santa Maria and became Archbishop of Burgos . Author of Minchat Ḳ ena'ot, he was considered a Jewish apostate by the 14 th century Jewish philosopher, Ibn Pulgar who had been his friend until his conversion. Later he became Archdeacon of Trevino, then Bishop of Carthagena. The King of Spain on his deatbed appointed him Keeper of the Royal Seal and Tutor of his infant son and successor, John II. He was made member of the Regency Council with the Queen-Mother and the Infante during the king’s minority. Finally he became Archbishop of Burgos and is known today as Paul de Burgos. He wrote several Hebrew and Spanish books for the conversion of the Jews. Influenced by the Pugio fidei contra Mauros et Jud aeos (1280) of Raymond Martin , a polemic work by a Christian using Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic name science and sefirotic science to support the notion of the Trinity, he produced similar proofs, greatly desiring to use this system to convert Jews. Under the name Alfonso de Valladolid he wrote “More Zedeq” (Mostrador de justicia), “The teacher of Righteousness.” He wrote an exposition on Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Ten Commandments and a Concordia legum of Judaism and Christianity. His four sons followed his example worthily, the second was raised to the bishopry after him. Pope Eugenius IV remarked “that in the presence of such a man, he felt ashamed to be seated in the chair of St. Peter. It is true that Abner did everything in his power to combat rabbinic Judaism, which prevented the Jewish people from hearing the gospel. Unfortunately, he also became known among Jewish circles as the most virulent representative of anti-Judaism, “initiating the intensified persecution of the Jews in Christian Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries by formulating a complete theory which claims the necessity for, and justification of, such persecution. He advised the abolition of Jewish autonomy, arguing that the Messiah would not come to the Jews ‘until the Jews possess no authority, not even such petty authority as is exercised over them by their rabbis and communal wardens who … hold vain promises to them in order to keep them under constant control. Only with the elimination of these dignitaries and judges and officers will salvation come to the masses" (polemical tract, Baer, op. cit., 350). In the name of "many discerning Jews," Abner blamed the Pope and Christian monarchs for failing to oppress the Jews adequately. The conditions of salvation for the Jews would come only "when many Jewish communities are massacred and the particular generation of Jews is thereby reduced in numbers, some Jews immediately convert to the dominant Christian faith out of fear, and in that way a handful are saved ... and the pain of impoverishment will lead to an increase of shamelessness among them, that is, they will no longer be ashamed to profess the truth openly and convert to Christianity’ (Baer, op. cit., 353-4).” Other so-called apostates accused of anti-Judaism were Nicholas Donin in France, Pablo Christiani, and Hieronymus de Sancta Fide (Joshua Lorki) in Spain, and Petrus Nigri (Schwartz) in Germany. Today, misrepresentation of the entire context of Judeo-Christian polemics in the 14 th century has contributed to the stigmatization of all Messianic Jews as apostates. Modern anti-missionaries claim falsely that all Jewish believers in Jesus are anti-Jewish apostates, “They are victims of Christian love. They are Jews who sold their birthright for a bowl of Christian pottage. As Jews they felt inferior to their Christian friends in a predominantly Christian environment. They were ashamed to be Jewish, so they looked for identity and acceptance among the goyim. They are fully baptized Christians, only in name are they different. They love it when other Jews join their ranks and so they spread their poison throughout the Jewish community.” The virulence of attacks against Messianic Jews is not new, as seen at http://www.messianic-racism.mcmail.com/mr/eth/g1.htm.
· HALFF,Charles. Baptist minister of San Antonio founds in 1948 an organization named, with Texas bluntness, the Christian Jew Foundation, and sponsors a radio show, The Christian Jew Hour, that includes Hebrew Christian gospel music and a sermon. He writes that when he became a Christian his father filed an insanity charge against him and had him jailed, and later offered him $85,000 to recant. The radio program, now called Messianic Perspectives, is still on the air.
· HARZUGE Johann prints in Cracow, Poland, in 1540 a New Testament with a Hebrew translation. In the next several years Paul Halicz, Paul Emulio, and Michael Adam also produce Hebrew and Yiddish translations of the New Testament.
· HEGESIPPUS (140 AD-), a Nazarene Christian, he was the first church historian. He quoted largely from the Gospel to the Hebrews, as the final authority on the life and teaching of Jesus and stated that certain books of the Apocrypha had been forged during his own lifetime.
· HELLER, Henry Leon (1880-) Born in Odessa, Russia, he was raised in an Orthodox family and sent to rabbibical in Western Russia. At sixteen , he lost his zeal and left for London in quest for work and from there to Glasgow where he found Yeshua as his Messiah. He then went to Canada where he entered the Bible Training School at Toronto, then Westminster College in St. Louis, MS where he graduated in 1910. In 1911 as a student of Princeton Theological Seminary he published From the rabbis to Christ: a personal narrative suggesting the kind of gospel that will appeal to the Jew.
· HERSCHEL, Haim Ridley(1807-1864), As a sixteen-year-old in Poland in 1823, he becomes anxious at Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) services when he joins in saying, "We have now no temple, no high priest, no altar, and no sacrifices." He eventually moves to London and founds the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews and teaches numerous Bible classes for both Jews and non-Jews. Along with Joseph Frey, he inspired the London Society and the British Society to promote evangelism among the Jews, in a time when the Church was awakening to the need of Christ in far off lands, but the apostolic order “to the Jew first” had so far touched few Christian consciences. When he dies in 1864, 300 policemen for whom he had held a weekly class are in the funeral procession. From 1846 to the end of the century the Society's foreign agents were mostly in Germany, Austria, Russia, Poland and Turkey, but during the 1920s the Haifa Mission became the principal foreign operation, with a staff of ten by 1925. The book depot there, shared with the BFBS, distributed 25,000 texts in Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, German and English during 1927-8, some of it in Baghdad by the hand of the indomitable colporteur Yusuf Abdullah. In 1936, the year of the Arab Strike and the Anschluss, extracts from foreign journals cease abruptly, and in the bad years which follow they are only partly restored. Two years later the Society quit Vienna. In 1976 the Society united with the Barbican Mission to the Jews to become Christian Witness to Israel: an almost full set of Annual Reports is kept at their premises in Sevenoaks, Kent. At least a quarter of a million Jews were won in the Nineteen Century.
· HERSCHEL, Sir William, (1738-1822) English astronomer. Using a telescope he constructed, discovers the planet Uranus in 1781. Herschel also fixes the positions of 2,500 nebulas, of which only 103 had previously been known. He infers the existence of binary stars, and then identifies 209 such pairs of stars that revolve around a common center. He discovers the infrared rays of the sun, defines and explains the composition of the Milky Way, and makes many other discoveries.
· HERTZ,Gustav Ferdinand Hertz(born David Gustav Hertz) a lawyer becomes a municipal official in Hamburg, Germany, in 1859 and holds various positions over the next 45 years. He works for reform of the justice and prison systems.
· HERZL, Hans, son of Theodore Herzl. (founder of modern Zionism), committed suicide in 1930 after growing up at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school, converting to Christianity, undergoing tremendous abuse, and then returning to liberal Judaism. The Baltimore Jewish Times honestly reports that "when Herzl's son became a convert to Christianity-not for material gain, but because he believed that if the idea of Jewish nationalism is thought to its final conclusion one can be a Christian Jew-he was read out of Jewry. The death of ... Herzl reminds us that in many instances we are ruthless fanatics." His death comes on the same day as the funeral of his sister, Pauline, a drug addict.
· HILLEL II, Jewish Patriarch whose deathbed confession of Christ was witnessed by his rabbinical student Count Joseph. After his death, Joseph found among his effects Hebrew texts of Matthew, John and the Acts of the Apostles and was himself convinced of the truth of Messiah Yeshua.
· HOWARD Phillips, former Nixon administration chairman of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, leaves the Republican Party and founds the Conservative Caucus in 1974. While looking into arguments against socialized medicine he runs across biblical perspectives on public policy, and that leads to his theological conversion. He says, "I began to spend more time studying the Scripture, both Old and New Testament, and began to come to grips with the constantly mentioned subject of blood sacrifice as the basis for atonement for sin where God was concerned. The ultimate blood sacrifice for sin, obviously, is Jesus Christ. I committed my life to Him as Lord and Savior and subsequently realized that there could be no disconnection between the Christian worldview, based on blood sacrifice and redemption, the scriptural testimony to this event, and one's commitment to impacting the culture for Christ, inside and outside of the political and activist arenas." Phillips founds the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992 and becomes its presidential candidate.
· HUSSERL, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is baptized at age 27 in 1886 in Vienna's principal Lutheran church, but fears that a deeper commitment to following Christ will alienate his students from him. A half-century later he declares, "From the days of my youth I have struggled against all forms of vanity, and now I have almost overcome them-professional vanity, too, the respect and admiration of pupils, without which no young teacher can work." In the 1930s, barred by Hitler's edict from universities, (along with other Jewish professors), he finds refuge in a Catholic convent. His last words in 1938, to a nurse, are, "I have seen something wonderful. Write it down quickly." The nurse returns with a notebook, but Husserl is dead.
· HYAMS, Marie & Sheila. Two successful businesswomen who could not escape Jesus. This tale of two sisters is told at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/Testimonies.htm
· ISAAC, Johannes & Stephan In 1546 Johannes and Stephan Isaac, father and son, convert to Lutheranism but have trouble afterwards deciding between it and Roman Catholicism. Both become Catholics, with Johannes becoming a professor of Hebrew at the University of Cologne and Stephan a priest, but in 1582-1583 Stephan delivers sermons opposing the worship of icons and saints and soon afterwards becomes a Protestant once again.
· JACOBS, Abraham in 1769publishes an autobiography in which he writes how he obtained a New Testament from a Lutheran pastor who came to study Hebrew with his father, a Frankfurt rabbi. Jacobs reads several pages a night, after his parents have gone to bed, and begins visiting the pastor's house. His father discovers him one night reading the New Testament and hits him. When Jacobs says he wants to convert, he is thrown out of the house, and eventually has to head to England.
· JACOBY, Ludwig S. (1813-1874) German Jew of polish descent, he sought Lutheran baptism for worldly advancement and emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio where he was awakened spiritually in a German Methodist church. He became a missionary in Missouri and later also in Germany and Switzerland. He began the first Methodist church west of the Mississippi in 1841, surviving pistol-firing, rock-throwing ruffians. He later returned to Germany to become a professor of Theology at the theological Seminary in Bremen, where he was editor to several religious newspapers, ran the bookstore and printing office, and headed the mission work. But then he made it back to St. Louis and died there in 1874. His last word was, "Hallelujah."
· JOCZ, Jakób (1906-1983) Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, to a believing Jewish cabinetmaker and his believing wife. Early on Jakob also became a committed disciple of Yeshua and turned to writing, teaching, and speaking to Jewish communities in Poland. Eventually, he immigrated to England then to Canada, where he became professor of theology. In 1949 he published his monumental The Jewish People and Jesus Christ: The Relationship Between Church and Synagogue. Before his death in 1983, he wrote an impassioned sequel in light of the events of the Holocaust and modern Jewish and Israeli efforts to study Jesus on their own terms. It's entitled The Jewish People and Jesus Christ After Auschwitz.
· JOHN,Theodore of Prague, in 1692 during the Shabbatai Zvi aftershock, converts because "vain waiting for a messiah" makes no sense to him "when really He is come long ago."
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:mNj0dkelEzoJ:www.saltshakers.com/lm/Theodore.rtf+Theodore+John+of+prague&hl=en
· JONAS, Giovanni Baptista(1588-1668)Jew from Safed, Palestine became assistant rabbi in Hamburg, was baptized in Poland in 1625. He went to Italy where he became professor of the University of Pisa, and later one of the Vatican Librarians. He made a Hebrew translation of the Gospels and compiled a Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon.
· JOSEPH , Count. Called the Apostate by the unbelieving Jews, he was met at the end of his life by Epiphanius who recounts his story: he was a rabbinical student who became a believer through his teacher Hillel II. He escaped attempts on his life twice for his faith for which he was rewarded by Emperor Constantine with the title of Count of the Roman Empire. He built churches in towns with large Jewish populations, like Tiberias, Nazareth and Sepphoris as evidenced in remaining inscriptions. At the end of his life, the anti-Jewish policy of the Church began to manifest itself more and more so that Constantine’s initial decree of protection of the “Baptized Jew” became swallowed up by prevailing anti-Jewish sentiment inside the churches where Jewish seekers inquired.
· JOSEPH, Rabbi A famous rabbi of Amsterdam who testified of his secret faith in Christ in the Jewish Intelligence, 1857, p.49. He spoke also of his grandfather who had heard the gospel from a Moravian brethren Jewish evangelist called “Rabbi Shemuel” from Zeist and who had suffered such persecution for his Christian faith that he disappeared from Amsterdam without a trace…
· JOSEF, Raphael, baptized in 1749, credits his first step toward conversion to buying what he thought was a Jewish book and finding that it is a copy of the New Testament in Yiddish. He decided to read it with the goal of refuting Christianity, but it filled him with doubts about Judaism.
· KASHTAN, Eitan. Israeli soldier. Hearing that his father-in-law, Jewish chess champion and a gamblerhad died a Christian believer in the USA, he started investigating... His testimony is at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/kashtan.htm
· KLIGERMAN, Aaron a convert of the Chicago Hebrew mission followed Solomon Birnbaum as director and missionary of Immanuel neighbourhood House in Baltimore, under the Presbyterian Board of National Missions. Today it is the Emmanuel Messianic Jewish congregation of Columbia, Maryland. See history on the web at: http://www.godwithus.org/from_the_rabbi/from_the_rabbi_13.html
· KLYBER, Arthur B.(1900-) U.S. Navy seaman, is baptized in 1920. He goes on to found Remnant of Israel, a missionary group, and also Catholics United for Life, which points out Hitler's opposition to abortion for Aryans but support of it for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other "inferior" groups. He serves as a priest for 65 years before retiring to a nursing home at the age of 96.
· KORNFELD, Boris Dr., imprisoned in a Soviet concentration camp in 1953 for political subversives, talks with a devout Christian and comes to believe in Christ. He tries to help starving prisoners by refusing to sign papers that will send them to their deaths, and he reports to the camp commandant an orderly who is stealing food from prisoners. One day he talks at length about Christ with a patient who has just been operated on for cancer. That night the orderly has his revenge and Dr. Kornfeld is murdered, but the patient ponders his words, becomes a Christian, and eventually writes about Kornfeld and conditions in the Gulag. The patient's name: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
· KUDLOW, Lawrence. Expresses faith in Christ in 1997 after emerging from a battle with cocaine addiction. A fervent 1980s supply-sider as undersecretary of Ronald Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, in 1994 The New York Times published a full-page article, "A Wall Street Star's Agonizing Confession," about Kudlow's life and addiction to cocaine. He resigns from his $1-million-a-year job as chief economist at the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns and later says, "As I hit bottom, I lost jobs, lost all income, lost friends, and very nearly lost my wife. I was willing to surrender and take it on faith that I had to change my life." He remembers one thing from the prep school he attended: "We had to say the Lord's Prayer in homeroom. Every morning at your desk you put your head down and say the Lord's Prayer. I was there grade seven through 12, so it's something you remember. When I was going into this dark abyss with alcohol and cocaine, after some terrible binge, I can remember lying in bed desperate and I started saying the Lord's Prayer. What made me do that? Just-I was desperate, I was trying to ask for help. You know, who was going to get me out of this? I started searching for God." Then, "All of a sudden it clicked, that Jesus Christ does not want me to touch alcohol or drugs because I wreck my body and I wreck His body and I wreck my life. Jesus died for me, too." Kudlow is now chief economist for CNBC and a frequent writer of articles that make the dismal science of economics understandable to magazine readers.
· LANDSMAN, Joseph I. In 1916, Joseph Landsman, a Polish-born Talmud scholar who emigrated to England, stresses the importance of Jewish Christians helping other Jews to become Christians: "Jewish believers ought to be one with the Gentile believers. But we have still another duty to perform, and that is to ... be better able to remove the stumbling block from before our own nation.... Has God opened our eyes and brought us out of bondage into liberty, out of darkness into His marvelous light, in order that we should leave our nation in its spiritual darkness, without knowledge of Messiah? ... If we do not care, who should?"
· LANDSMANN, Daniel. A Jerusalem tailor and Talmudic scholar baptized in 1863, is almost killed by his own people, angered that someone well educated in Jewish tradition should become a Christian. His beliefs begin to change when he finds upon the street a page in Hebrew torn from a book. He loves what he reads, and when he later finds out that it is the Sermon on the Mount, he thinks differently about Jesus than he did before. When he tells all that he believes Jesus is the Messiah, his wife leaves him, one fanatical group puts spikes in his hands, and another tries to bury him alive. He finally moves to New York City and, with a wealth of Talmudic knowledge and a humble spirit, moves many to consider Christ.
· LEMANN Augustin & Joseph. Jewish twins from Lyon, France who became Catholic Priests. A biograohy was written by Father Theotime de St. Just, Les Frères Lemann: Juifs convertis (Paris: Librairie St. François, 1937) They worked tirelessly for the cause of the Jewish people within the Catholic Church. They wrote, La cause des restes d’Israel introduite au Concile Oecuménique du Vatican (Paris: Lecoffre, 1912) and Valeur de l’Assemblée qui prononça la peine de mort contre Jesus-Christ (Villegenon: Ed. Ste Jeanne d’Arc, 1997) [ Read more] at http://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/alljews.html#lemanns
· LEVERTOFF , Paul Phillip (1878-1954): late 19th and early 20th century pioneering Hebrew-Christian scholar and leader. Born in Orsha, Belarus, as Feivel Levertoff, of a Sephardic background whose religious persuasion was Hassidic. Attended the Volozhin Yeshiva, a Lithuanian Jewish prominent Rabbinic seminary. He was baptized in 11 August 1895 in Königsberg, where he was pursuing University studies. Seeking employment as a missionary on 11 December 1896, he applied for a position with the London Jews Society (L JS). He was accepted and soon worked full time in his new vocation. In 1901, having joined the staff of the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI), founded by David Baron and Charles Andrew Schönberger in 1893, he served as their principal translator and writer. He published numerous articles in the Scattered Nation between 1901-1909 and traveled throughout the Mediterranean as one the most active missionaries. [ Read more] Levertoff’s book on Jesus in Hebrew, Ben ha-Adam, (“The Son of Man”) predated Joseph Klausner’s own book on Jesus, Yeshu ha-Notsri, by over 17 years, which itself is generally considered the first book written on Jesus and Christianity’s early beginnings by a Jewish scholar in Modern Hebrew. It has been reprinted in Israel Jerusalem: Dolphin (1968). He also authored Viduyei Augustinus ha-Kadosh (“The Confessions of St. Augustine”), the first translation into Hebrew of a major work by a Latin Church Father. In 1910, he was appointed as Evangelist in Constantinople by the United Free Church of Scotland Jewish Committee, met his Welsh future wife there, and returned to England where they got married. He was appointed to the position of teacher of Hebrew and Rabbinics with the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (IJD), a postgraduate institute for Jewish missions founded by Franz Delitzsch in Leipzig, Germany. He relocated from Warsaw to Leipzig on 1 April 1912, to take over the teaching position at the IJD, which had been left vacant by the death of Jechiel Zebi Herschensohn-Lichtenstein. A year later, Levertoff and a colleague posthumously published Lichtenstein’s revised Matthew commentary in Hebrew. The IJD’s class schedules from 1912 to 1917 (published in its journal Saat auf Hoffnung) have Levertoff teaching a variety of courses. He was commissioned by the University [of Leipzig] to write three books:. The edition and German translation, with commentary, of the Pesikta Rabbati, a collection of ancient Synagogue homilies never before translated into any language, a German translation of the whole of the Palestinian Talmud [Talmud Yerushalmi], with commentary, “Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim” – the first systematic treatise on intellectual Jewish mysticism. The first and third of these works were produced, though, for lack of funds, only the third was published. The Talmud… never reached the public…[because of] the advent of a new “race-cultured” system in Germany… render[ed] its publication impossible. Levertoff eventually made an English adaptation of this third work that he later published as Love and the Messianic Age. It was his attempt in exploring similarities between Hassidic and New Testament theology. Impoverisshed by WWI, Levertoff and his family returned to his wife’s native Wales, where, between 1919 through 1922, he held the position of librarian at St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden (Flintshire County). During this time, he was also ordained by the Archbishop of Wales into the Church of England. In 1923, he became Director of the East London Fund for the Jews and took over Holy Trinity, a church in Shoreditch while making his residence in Ilford. While in this position, he published the quarterly The Church and the Jews. He followed in the tradition of Joseph Rabinowitz and Hayyim Yedidyah Pollak, to establish an independent community and congregation of Jewish believers. Levertoff appealed to “… those Jews who are not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ and of their Jewish origin … to unite as a community … and institute Jewish Christian services of worship which would present our Faith in terms of the rich background of devotional and mystical Jewish traditions.” To that end in 1925, Levertoff published his Hebrew liturgy Meal of the Holy King. Levertoff read from a Torah scroll with tallit and kippah as part of the Hebrew services at Holy Trinity. Levertoff himself mentions his involvement with the IHCA’s Hebrew Christian Church Commission in 1932 in his publication, The Church and the Jews. In the same space, he presents his own draft for the “The Ten Principles of the Faith of the Hebrew Christian Church” much of which was later incorporated into the final version as “The Proposed Articles of Faith for the Hebrew Christian Church.” In 1933, along with Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, he helped translate the Zohar into English for the first time for Soncino Press. During his tenure as the priest at Holy Trinity, in addition to leading a small community of Jewish believers, Levertoff assisted everyone from Hans Herzl , also a believer and son of Theodore Herzl, to provide succor to refugees from Austria and Nazi Germany. One intriguing work by Levertoff that unfortunately seems lost is Christ and the Shekinah, which Lev Gillet, a friend of Levertoff, first mentioned in 1939. Levertoff considered it his magnum opus. Gillet explains “…[Levertoff] understood the importance of an intellectual appeal and the necessity of expressing the theological concepts of Christianity in Jewish terms (according to him, along the lines of the Shekinah teaching and of Hasidic mysticism).” Levertoff lived in the twilight of the Haskalah and died 31 July 1954, at the dawn of the modern Jewish state. He is today perhaps more relevant to us than he was 75 years ago when he seemed nothing more than a fringe theological curiosity. (Source:adapted from From Mishkan #37, Fall 2002. © J. Quiñónez)
· LEVISON, Leon. Founder and head of the International Hebrew Christian Alliance, rallied Jewish Christians to oppose Hitler in 1933. Levison stated that there are 2.35 million Jews in Germany: 600,000 still identifying with Judaism and "one and three-quarter million Christians of Jewish descent who go back to the second, third and fourth generation." Both groups, he notes, "are treated as Jews and are subject to vicious discrimination." Jewish Christians also face discrimination from their own people: "If they apply to Jewish Relief agencies, they are told they must abandon their belief in Jesus."
· LEWEK, initially worked 13 years with the Chicago Hebrew Mission, then branched out on his own for another 13 years. Then he was called by the Christian Missionary Alliance to direct the work of its mission in New York City, “Beth Dor She Emeth” and act as its missionary.
· LIBERMANN, Jacob (Francis) (1804-1852) born in Alsace, son of a rabbi, in 1826 converted and was renamed Francis Libermann. In 1840 after a visit with Pope Gregory XVI, he founded the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to send apostles to the Negroes of Mauritius, Haiti and Africa. http://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/libermann.html
· LICHTENSTEIN, Isaac, (?-1909). A Hungarian Rabbi, he preached Messiah Yeshua to his Jewish hungarian congregation in Tapio-Szele who refused to dismiss him in spite of persecution for years, saying “I shall most willingly retract if you can convince me that I am wrong.” Later witnessed in many parts of the European for twenty years about the truth of Yeshua til his death. He died on Oct. 16, 1909, leaving writings explaining how he read a copy of the New Testament after 40 years of work as a rabbi in Hungary and was impressed by "the greatness, power, and glory of this book, formerly a sealed book to me. All seemed so new to me and yet it did me good like the sight of an old friend.... I had thought the New Testament to be impure, a source of pride, of selfishness, of hatred, and of the worst kind of violence, but as I opened it I felt myself peculiarly and wonderfully taken possession of. A sudden glory, a light flashed through my soul. I looked for thorns and found roses; I discovered pearls instead of pebbles; instead of hatred, love; instead of vengeance, forgiveness; instead of bondage, freedom." A letter to his son, a doctor, reports that "From every line in the New Testament, from every word, the Jewish spirit streamed forth light, life, power, endurance, faith, hope, love, charity, limitless and indestructible faith in God." Others, hating the idea of a long-term rabbi turning "renegade," attack Lichtenstein. His reply: "I have been an honored rabbi for the space of 40 years, and now, in my old age, I am treated by my friends as one possessed by an evil spirit, and by my enemies as an outcast. I am become a butt of mockers, who point the finger at me. But while I live I will stand on my watchtower, though I may stand there all alone. I will listen to the words of God."
· LICHTENSTEIN, Leopold, (1813-1882). Chazan of Habscheim at age 16, in Alsace, he came to faith in 1834 and had to flee persecution for it. He later became a pastor, writer and missionary to New York, and Cincinnati, Ohio.
· LOANS, Jechiel, personal physician of Emperor Frederick III who ruled from Linz in Austria. He was so good a physician that the emperor knighted him, a unique fate for a Jew in the sixteenth century. He conformed to Christian life and agreed to teach a Gentile, the famous German Hebraist Reuchlin Hebrew. This Reuchlin later produced a Hebrew grammar, and stimulated Christian academic study and reading the Bible from the original Hebrew. He also led the humanist resistance to obscurantism and, in a pamphlet war, defeated Pfefferkorn (a radical Jewish convert who pushed publicly for the burning of all Jewish books to facilitate the assimilation of all Jews to Christianity).
· LOEB, Ludwig and Jenny, a Jewish married couple, convert to Catholicism in 1906. Ludwig Loeb becomes a mining engineer and emigrates to the Dutch East Indies where five of the eight Loeb children are born. They return to Holland, and of the six older children three become monks and three become nuns. The Loeb parents have both died by the time World War II begins, and those six children all die at Nazi hands.
· LOEWENTHAL, Isidorborn in Germany, and trained in Orthodox Yeshiva in Poland, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, went to Afghanistan (1855-1864), one of the first missionaries there under the auspices of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. He translated the New Testament into Pushtu, had it printed, and compiled a Pushtu dictionary. He spoke with many Muslim leaders and advised British officials following the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion where he translated the N.T. in Pushtu. But he was shot and killed accidentally by his own chowkeydar (watchman) and died at age 37, just a year after one of his friends, Rev. Levi Janvier, a missionary doctor in India was murdered by a Sikh fanatic. He had spent only seven years in Peshawar, yet in that brief period he had made himself acquainted with the Pushtu, and had translated into this difficult language the whole of the New Testament, and put the same through the press. He had also nearly completed a Pushtu dictionary. He could preach with facility in the Pushtu, Persian, Hindustani and Arabic languages. It has been said that probably no other foreigner at that time in India, had so thorough a knowledge of Asiatic literature and so intimate an acquaintance with the manners and customs of the people of the land and with Oriental politics as he. He had a thorough knowledge of the religious system of the people, and as a disputant with Mohammedans and other religionists he was a master. His library, which filled the four sides of his study, the higher shelves reached by a ladder, contained the rarest books and most ancient manuscripts to be found in any private library in India.
· LOPEZ, Rodrigo, a refugee from the Inquisition in Portugal to England in 1559, he became a believer and rose to become Physician to Queen Elizabethin 1586. Such favor aroused a great deal of jealousy and soon he was accused of being a spy and traitor to the crown. Without a shred of evidence, he was arrested, put on trial and condemned in 1594. The queen hesitated, but finally signed the death warrant after three months. To his death, he maintained his innocence and loyalty to both the Queen and Jesus Christ.
· LUCKY, Hayim Yedidiah (an Austrian Jew, 1842-) published Eduth l’Yisrael and was the focal point of an active movement made up of Rabbis, writers and others who sought to restore Jesus in the Jewish framework. Many of his followers accepted the Messiahship of Yeshua without severing their ties to the Jewish community and died in Hitler’s Holocaust.
· LUSTIGER, Jean-Marie (Cardinal) (1926-) born of a Polish Jewish family in France, his parents were deported during the Nazi occupation while he lived with a Christian family in Orléans. He was Baptist Catholic at the age of 13, became a priest in 1954, Bishop of Orléans in 1979, Archishop of Paris in 1981 and elevated to Cardinal in 1983. He gave an address on “Jews and Christians Tomorrow” at the 1998 Nostra Aetate Awards now online at http://www.nostreradici.it/lustiger.htm
· MAIER, Christophorus Paulus (formerly Solomon ben Maier of Frankfurt) turned to Christ in 1673 after being disappointed by the false messiah Shabbatai Zvi.
· MARCUSSON, J.W.(d. 1913) Born in Scalat, in Galicia, Austria, son of Herman Ben Fion, a learned Jewish scholar. The family moved to Odessa, Russia where they met Rev. W.G. Schauffler who became their lifelong friend. Deep searchings in the Scriptures led to his father’s conversion and separation from his family. They moved to Constantinople where his father was baptized and changed his name to Marcusson. By the age of 14, J.W. had learned Russian, German & French at his grandfather school in Odessa, and desired to become a merchant. But his mother died and at the age of 18 joined his father in Constantinople where he found and read the New Testament. He realized the crucified one was indeed the promised Messiah of the Jews. The influences of the lives of Dr. Schauffler and his father impressed him deeply. After the death of his mother, his father remarried and moved to Jerusalem in 1845 where J.W. attended an Episcopal College. He was baptized by Dr. Nicosayson and studied Arabic in preparation for ministry. But instead he returned to Constantinople and resolved to go to America where he completed his training as missionary to the Jews at the Willington Preparatory School of East Hampton, Mass. He was then appointed to the new ABCFM Salonica mission which soon was transferred to the Church of Scotland and labored there for three years. Returning to America, he filled several pulpits and became associated with the Chicago Hebrew Mission, becoming its Superintendent and pastor in 1895 where he became affectionately known as “Father Morrison”. He served the mission for 25 years before his untimely death.
· MARGARITHA, Antonius, son of a German chief rabbi, converts to Christianity in 1522 and soon writes Der ganz Judisch glaub (The Entire Jewish Faith), a critical examination of Jewish customs and community structures.
· MARGOLIOUTH, Moses (1818-1881) Jewish Historian.
· MEDICI, Paolo(17 th century) converts after he comes to believe that the long list of false messiahs "accepted and credited" by Jews shows they are missing the truth.
· MELAMMED, Jacob converts in 1676 with his family because "Shabbatai Zvi, for whom we had waited for a whole year with fasts and mortifications, was all lies."
· MEN, Alexander (1935-1990) “ Father Men was the eastern CS Lewis”, a brilliant thinker and kind spiritual mentor capable of communicating abstract theology in the language of the common man. The ancestors of Fr Alexander Men came to Russia in the 18th century from the West, together with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots (German Jews). He was the son of Wolf Men, an engineer and Yelena Semyonovna, also Jewish. In 1935, his mother and her new-born son Alexander were baptized by Fr Seraphim Batyukov who spent his life in clandestine conditions in order to escape the GPU (security police)... . [ Read more] A woman with a strong gift of faith, she thus joined that part of the Russian Orthodox Church which was called the Catacomb Church. The Catacomb (underground) Church consisted of those priests and lay people who managed to remain alive having refused to collaborate with the atheistic authorities in the bloody persecution of the faith and the Church. Later the Catacomb Church joined the Moscow Patriarchate. From childhood Men wanted to be a priest but first he decided to get a secular education. He was greatly fond of biology and studied it in an institute; but he was expelled before graduating exams when it was discovered that he took part in the Divine Service as a minister. Meanwhile, Men's Jewish origin and intellectual level were quite uncommon and could serve as obstacles to his desire to become a priest. But these were overcome by the new wave of persecution that was organized against the Church by Khrushchev. In a state of constant risk of being exterminated, Church authorities became more tolerant to such "extravagances" as unusual blood and mind. In 1958 Men was ordained a deacon, and in 1960 a priest. His friends Gleb Yakunin (whom Men had helped to come to Christ) and Dmitrii Dudko were ordained in 1970s -- both became famous religious dissidents. Alexander Men’s early works were addressed to unbelievers and struggled first of all against the atheistic myths of Soviet propaganda. In contrast to some Western editions of his books, in Russian they are written with a nice Russian language, with a profound knowledge of the psychology of the "Soviet" human type and its main superstitions. He has also written a multi-volume dictionary on the Bible (still unpublished) and organized translations of a great amount of Catholic and Protestant books and their circulation in samizdat (clandestine publishing).
From his ordination to his death Fr Alexander had a clear idea of his aim, hierarchy of values and methods. Foremost was the creation of a parish, of a flock, of a church society. That's why he preferred not to risk political activities: he created human persons while others struggled for human rights. He didn't publicly criticize church authorities for their policy of compromise, suggesting that it was of no practical purpose: church authorities couldn't do anything if there were no active church people, whom he tried to establish. The head is weak without a body.
In order to create such a body of church people Fr Alexander took from the West a tradition of catechizing (previously absent in Russia) and of Bible-reading-and-praying seminars. He recommended reading the books of great Russian Christian thinkers - Solovyov, Berdiaev, Bulgakov - the last step of cultural tradition broken in 1917. His parishioners actively reprinted both Russian and Western theological literature by clandestine methods. Beginning in 1988, Fr Alexander had the opportunity to preach to large masses of people - as much as any other person speaking on religious matters in a country long spiritually-starved. The difference between Fr Alexander and other preachers was that people came to hear him a second time! He was not dull, he was distinctively "Russian." Alexander knew better than other Russian Orthodox priests the spiritual needs of his compatriots, especially of Moscow intellectuals and their specific ways of communicating and understanding. His audience consisted mostly of teachers, engineers, and students. He not only "converted" many to Christ but helped them to begin a full-scale life in the Church. The word "help" is of a great importance. There are a few active priests in Russia and in Moscow particularly who are similar to Fr Men in their energy (although his was the greatest) but different in pastoral style. They prefer to have strict and constant control of the spiritual life of believers, leading them by the hand to the eve of the tomb. Many people enjoy this sort of church slavery: seeking not spiritual guidance to Christ but a kind of spiritual slavery to a priest. Moslems leave their boots upon entering a mosque - Christians often tend to leave their will and brains upon entering the Church. This all-human tendency is a special temptation in Russia, with its long tradition of ideological dictatorship. The method of Fr Men was to help a person to find freedom in Christ and to teach him to stand on his own feet. His contribution to Russia's spirituality was and is significant. Shortly before his death, his name and voice were well-known to Moscow and Russia beyond through well-publicized radio and television broadcasts. His parish church was constantly full, during and between services as he preached, performed ritual and counseled intellectuals, peasants, poets, and babushki. Father Men was, however, an intensely controversial figure, a curse which followed him to his grave, as debates about his work raged after his murder. When religion was presented as subversive superstition, Men preached a wise, sensitive Christianity. When, during glasnost', Orthodoxy returned as a powerful nationalistic force, Men preached a tolerant, ecumenical vision of God's religion. His kind wisdom repeatedly caused conflicts with those at the top but transformed the lives of the people. Although Men has written many essays and sermons, probably his favorite work was his biography of Christ, Son of Man. His first book, The Son of Man was written as a "key to the New Testament" for the thinking person. Later this book became the seventh and final volume of his study of world religions, the series In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life, thus making the point that the coming of Christ was an event of world significance for all mankind, and the answer to the search of all great faiths. Son of Manrepresents the combination of accessible religion and conscientious scholarship. It is important both as a rich religious treatise and as a snapshot of the religious history of a nation with a complex legacy. This conversation between a priest and his parishioners speaks much of the worldview of the people. He was open to any truth from other branches of Christianity and other religions. On the question of his attitude to Catholics and Protestants, he said, "The walls we erect between ourselves are not high enough to reach up to God". Immediately after the revolution emancipated Jews, Jews who abandoned their own tradition, were the most valuable agents in the Communist attempts to destroy the Church. Fr. Alexander Men once said: “When a Jew betrays his dedication to God he betrays himself and easily finds himself in the power of dark forces. Being chosen is a great and terrible responsibility.” (Vestnik RHD 117, 1976 p 113). Gregory Benevitch in his web article The Jewish Question in the Russian Orthodox Church acknowledges that “OUR CHURCH SHOULD NOT ALLOW TO USE HER HOLY NAME IN THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER, IN THE IDEOLOGY. She should not allow to declare Russia as the only one true Orthodox country in the world… If now we return to the Jewish question, one may acknowledge that as usual, attitude towards the Jews may serve as a touch stone of spiritual health (now of the Church).” With the liberty granted by perestroika, Alexander Men began increasingly to sense that his time was short and not a moment should be lost. In his last two years Fr. Alexander's efforts entered a new phase - that of preaching Christ's Gospel openly. He gave a lot of lectures in institutes, clubs and before various audiences. He initiated many good works directed to charity, education and much more. It was proposed that he become a preacher on Russian television and dean of the Theological University. F r Alexander can be called the architect of Christian renewal in Russia , a renewal which has implications for all Christians as we enter the twenty-first century. He was a beloved pastor who baptized thousands while serving at a village church thirty miles outside of Moscow. He was confidant and advisor to people ranging from Andrey Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the simplest of believers. F r Alexander was a man rooted in Russian 0rthodoxy whose vision was open to other traditions, embracing all Christians as brothers and sisters, and all of humanity for Christ. Bishop Seraphim (Sigrist) has said: " Christianity today cannot be understood without understanding the life and work of Fr. Alexander Men. " On Saturday, September 8, 1990 Fr Alexander went to Moscow after the Divine Service and read a lecture entitled "Christianity". More than 600 people gathered in a so-called "club" in the center of Moscow to listen to him. This lecture was the last in a series on the history of religions that Fr Alexander read in the spring of 1990. Besides lecturing himself, some of his parishioners assisted him by lecturing on religious philosophy, church history, etc. The next morning, as on every Sunday, Fr Alexander departed his house at 6:30 for the temple. Somebody was waiting for him on the wooded path. Fr Alexander was killed by a blow of an ax to his head. His death became a political event. He was mourned popularly and the announcement of his death met with ambiguity in government and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Practically everybody was sure it was a deed of the KGB and compared this murder with that of the Polish Catholic priest Jerzy Popeliushko. Some suggested that Fr Alexander was killed not by the officers of the KGB themselves but by some pro-fascist people whom the Communists had inspired and supported for a time. The killers have never been found, but significantly the KGB declared that most probably Fr Alexander was killed by his opponents within the Church--monks with anti-Semitic views. Fr Alexander’s murder, still unsolved, marks an epoch: the last martyrdom of the Soviet period just as the door was opening towards the future. His work lives today through an ever-broadening circle of spiritual children and people drawn to his legacy: and that not only in Russia and not only among the 0rthodox, but among Christians of all traditions, east and west. It was significant that the funeral of Fr. Alexander took place on the day consecrated to the beheading of John the Baptist. Sources: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2096/amenpage.html
Yakov Kratov’s account at http://home.earthlink.net/~amenpage/amen-bio2.htm
· MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY, Felix (1809-1847). Baptized as a child, wrote his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1826. The great composer who catapulted Bach to fame, he brought new public attention to Bach's music, composed the St. Paul oratorio and his final, the Elijah oratorio, as well as the Wedding March performed everywhere to usher the bride. He aroused the resentment of anti-Semites by helping Jewish musicians. He composed the music to "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and harmonized "Now Thank We All Our God," among other hymns. He was a Jewish Christian, the son of another Jewish Christian, Abraham and grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, considered the Father of the Jewish Renaissance, a famous German Jewish philosopher. A few more words about his illustrious grandfather are in order: In October 1763, the king had granted Moses the privilege of Protected Jew ( Schutz-Jude)--which assured his right to undisturbed residence in Berlin. His German translation of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible (1783) had made Moses the Martin Luther of the German Jews. From it, the Jews learned the German language and imbibed culture; with it there came a new desire for German nationality; he became the first great champion of Jewish emancipation in the 18th century. He had also been the best friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the son of a clergyman, the author of theological writings and a sharp critic of antisemitism, which caused many Jewish families to adopt the name Lessing. Moses’ own descendants—Joseph, Abraham, Nathan, a brilliant circle, of which the musician Felix was the most noted—each left the Synagogue for the Church. Felix died before completing his Christ oratorio.
· MESHIACH, see Yeshua
· MEYER, Louis (1862-1912) Born in Civitz, Germany and raised with a secular education, went to medical school and started his studies to become a surgeon at the Royal Surgical Hospital at Halle where he contracted blood poisoning. This forced him to go abroad and he resolved to finish his studies in Cincinnati, Ohio, but changed his mind after accepting Jesus as his savior through Rev. J.E. Smith (Reformed Presbyterian Church) in 1891 and baptized in 1892. He then pursued theological studies and graduated from the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary in Allegheny, Pa. in 1897. He studied the effects of evangelism upon Jews, contending that even those who reject Christianity benefit: They have learned to think for themselves instead of merely accepting "the teachings of the rabbis." He becomes a pastor and one of the editors of The Fundamentals, the 90 essays produced between 1910 and 1915 to explain the difference between Christianity and modernism. Rev. Smith’s oldest daughter became his wife in 1898 and became the first Jewish Christian Minister of that denomination. In 1900 he transferred to a pastorate in Hopkinton, Ia, lecturing at the local Lenox College, then served the Chicago Hebrew Mission as General sec’y, editing The Jewish Era. He traveled thousands of miles, giving lectures in the US and abroad, recognized as a master statistician with a storehouse of missionary intelligence concerning the Jews.
· MEYER, Theodore Jonas(1819-1894) German scholar who journeyed through orthodox Judaism, atheism, back to Judaism which he studied zealously. An earnest inquiry into the New Testament came to faith. While a Hebrew tutor in Scotland, he was selected to be the missionary to the Jews at Galatz, Moldavia, then Austria, Bohemia, Hungary. Finally asPresbyterian missionary in Italy, he nurses those dying in a cholera epidemic until he also falls prey to the disease in 1866. Barely surviving, he rushed to the aid of the Italian Protestants during a massacre at Barletta. As he becomes a peacemaker between Catholics and Protestants, his presence changed the climate of despair and persecution into one of hope and recognition of Italian Protestants whose rights were officially vindicated. Later he writes about what his own background taught him about justification by faith: "I was brought up in the fear of God by my parents, who were pious rabbinical Jews.... I sought to appease Him, and to earn His mercy, by work and prayer.... But with all this I still felt uneasy, and always believed that I had not done enough." He spent the remainder of his life as a missionary to the Jews in Amsterdam and in London.
· MONIS, Judah Rabbi, after becoming the first Jew to receive a college degree in America (M.A., Harvard, 1720), publicly embraces Christianity in 1722 and joined the faculty at Harvard as a Hebrew teacher. Even though his stipend will never go above that given to the janitor, he will remain, enduring derision from his students for the rest of his life, yet develop friendships with such as Increase & Cotton Mather. He publishes an appeal to his fellow Jews called The Truth around 1730. In 1735, aided by a loan from Harvard, he publishes a Hebrew grammar, the first to be published in America.
· MONTEFIORE, Claude J.G. (1859-1939) published the first Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (1909) from a Jewish perspective and for Jewish readership and interest.
· MOROSINI , Giulio (17 th century)converts saying that his faith does not depend on Jewish messianic failure, but is strengthened by it.
· MOSES Sephardi (1062-1110) physician in ordinary to the King of Aragon under the name of Petrus Alfonsi, author of Disciplina Clericalis. Sent to England to become the personal physician to King Henri I, taught astronomy to Walcher, prior of Malvern introducing Arab scientific reckoning into the traditional latino-ecclesiastical traditions of the West.
· NATHANSON, Bernard, Dr. former student of Karl Stern, runs in New York City the largest abortion clinic in the world, and co-founds the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Law in 1969. After being involved directly or indirectly in over 75,000 abortions (including one of his own child) and seeing his political goals achieved with the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision that legalizes abortion nationwide, he comes to understand that he has been killing human beings. In the late 1970s he becomes a leading pro-life advocate and produces an effective video, The Silent Scream. Contact with Christian pro-life workers gets him thinking about the source of their dedication: "They prayed, they supported and encouraged each other, they sang hymns of joy.... They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic.... And I wondered: How can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?" Nathanson in the 1990s becomes a Christian.
· NEANDER, Johann August Whilhelm (1789-1850) was born David Nendel but adopted the name Neander “new man” at the time of his baptism in Hamburg in 1806. His teacher Schleiermacher recommended him to the chair of the newly founded University of Berlin in 1810. One observer commented on the "sad and singular sight" of "Schleiermacher, a Christian by birth, inculcating in one lecture room with all the power of his mighty genius, those doctrines which led to the denial of the evangelical attributes of Jesus." Meanwhile, in another room "Neander, by birth a Jew, preached and taught salvation through faith in Christ the Son of God alone." He becomes a professor of theology in 1812 at Heidelberg. Neander wrote many scholarly books, including the multivolume General History of the Christian Religion and Church. He is best remembered as a church historian and for His Life of Christ. Before his death in 1850 he went blind, but dictated notes for the last section of his church history on the last day of his life.
· NEANDER, John. Trained in Talmud and Rabbinics, he subsequently became a believer and pastor within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., joining its Board of Foreign Missions in 1849.
· NOVAK, Robert teamed up with Rowland Evans 1963 to write a column on Washington politics, "Inside Report." It became one of the longest-running syndicated columns in the United States, known for its scoops and feisty analysis. Novak continued the column after Evans's death in 1993, became a television regular as well, and became a Roman Catholic.
· OLASKY, Marvin. Born ina Jewish-American family, Marvin declared himself an atheist at 13 and remained so for the next decade. Then followed three transition years that ended with his becoming a Christian at age twenty-six. A renowned syndicated columnist, he is a professor of Journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and the editor-in-chief of World, America’s fourth most read newsweekly. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Fortune, National Review, and many other leading publications. The author of eighteen books on History, Philanthropy, Journalism and Religion and Society, he is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan. His books include Standing for Christ in a Modern Babylon, Whirled Views, Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration and The Religions Next Door : What the Reporters are Missing.
· OTTO, Julius Conrad. A learned Jewish convert (early 18 th century)
· PALGRAVE, Sir Francis Cohen (1788-1861) Jewish Christian Historian.
· PAULI, C.W.H. ordainedJewish Christian missionary whotook charge of the Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews’ mission to the Jews of Berlin and in 1844 to the 35,000 Jews of Amsterdam. His zeal could not be stopped by the local rabbis’ attempts to thwart his efforts.
· PELTZ, Jacob employed by the Chicago Hebrew Mission in his student days, later became Secretary of the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America and the International Hebrew Christian Alliance, headquartered in London.
· PFEFFERKORN, Johannes. Converted in 1505 in Cologne, Germany, two years later writes Der Judenspiegel, which condemns the persecution of Jews but also calls the Talmud and many Jewish customs anti-biblical.
· PHILLIPUS, Franciscus Lotharius (Wolf Levi of Lublin), Simcha Hasid, and 11 other Polish Jews convert to Protestantism in 1707 after their messianic hopes are dashed; Phillipus writes that others become Roman Catholics, but all have "recognized the true Messiah and Savior."
· PIERLEONI, Cardinal. See ANACLETUS II, Pope.
· POLANYI, Michael (1891-1976), Hungarian Jew and one of the greatests scientists and philosophers of the 20 th century. He was born to a family of non-observant Jews from Hungary, baptized as a Catholic as a young adult, was married in a civil ceremony and later endorsed Protestantism. When he moved from Hungary to Germany, he did so as an Austrian citizen. Driven out of Germany by the rise of the National Socialists, he chose England as his new home. He became a brilliant physical chemist but left the laboratory to affirm the foundation of personal knowledge on which authentic science and humane societies are based. He realized that the misleading ideals of objectivity derived from science were poisoning society and embarked on a career in economics, social analysis and philosophy. His philosophical ideas were first appreciated by religious thinkers and theologians. His later writings tried more directly to discuss religion and religious knowledge. He was convinced that his philosophy of science would support a renewal of the religious and ethical traditions on which Western civilization depends. William T. Scott & Martin X. Moleski have written the first biography of this extraordinary man, entitled Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher. Oxford University Press, 2005 .
· RABINOWITZ, Joseph ben David(1837-1899), Russian Orthodox (Chasidic) Rabbi of Kishinev in Bessarabia, Hebrew scholar and writer. After the pogroms of 1881, he sought a Jewish homeland to solve the Jewish dilemma. He arrived in Jerusalem in 1882, representing Russian Jews, and while standing on the Mount of Olives, overlooking Jerusalem, he realized that "Jesus, our brother" was the only solution. On returning to Kishinev in 1885, he established the first modern messianic congregation called "the First Assembly of the Israelites of the New Covenant." Talmudic scholar and lawyer Joseph Rabinowitz is baptized in 1885 and, through writings and sermons, begins influencing Russian Jews to become "Sons of the New Covenant." He draws up a list of 12 articles of faith, patterned after Maimonides's 13 principles, but proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. He writes parables such as this one: "Two foolish people were traveling in a four-wheeled wagon. Noticing that the wagon was moving heavily, they examined it and found that a wheel was missing. One of the foolish people sprang out and ran forward along the road, saying to every one he met, 'We have lost a wheel. Have you seen one?' At last a wise man said to him, 'You are looking in the wrong direction. You should seek your wheel behind the wagon, not in front of it.' This is the mistake that Jews have been making all of these centuries. The four wheels of Hebrew history are Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Jews have been looking into the future when they should have been looking into the past." He kept ties with many Christian denominations, but kept his congregation insulated from denominational controversies and maintained the Jewish feasts and order of service (Aron Kodesh, Shabbat, Hebrew siddur, brit milah, mikveh-baptism, prayers and preaching in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian). However the Brit Hadashah became part of the Scriptures and verses concerning Yeshua adorned the walls, such as, near the Torah, "Messiah is the end of the law." He also maintained that all Jewish believers retained their Jewish identity although there is no difference between Jews and gentile believers. Most of his flock were victims of war and the Holocaust.
· RAGSTADT Von WEILLE, Friedrich was baptized in 1669, saying that an infusion of Jewish Christian believers will revitalize Christian churches
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· RATISBONNE, Alphonse (d. 1887) When his brother Theodor became a Catholic priest in Strasbourg, France, Alphonse resolved never to see him again and developed a strong antipathy to the Catholic faith. He followed after his father’s footsteps as a banker and became an atheist devoted to the betterment of his fellow Jews. At the age of 27 during a prenuptial tourist trip in Italy, he felt alone in Naples and entered a church where his spiritual hunger led him to pray to God for the first time. He was baptized in Rome in 1842. Soon after, he broke off his marriage engagement and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1847, but then left that order so as to develop charitable works in Jerusalem. He moved to the Holy Land and with his brother Theodor, founded a Congregation of Nuns, “The Congregation of Our Lady of Sion,” to pray for the conversion of the Jews on the site of Pilate’s palace at the spot where the crowd had cried “Crucify Him!” He built there a convent, school, church, and two orphanages for girls, and then adds an orphanage and school of mechanical arts for boys, spending the rest of his life working and praying for the conversion of his fellow Jews. He died in 1884 at Ain Karem, John the Baptist’s birthplace near Jerusalem, thankful that the Lord had fulfilled his cherished goal to work to improve the lot of the Jews.
[ read more] at http://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/alljews.html
· RATISBONNE, Theodore of France amazes his friends by being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1827. Until then he has opposed both his family's Jewish traditions and Christianity as well. But one day he speaks to God: "If You really exist, let me know the truth, and I swear to consecrate my life to it." Through philosophical study he gradually comes to believe that God does exist. He sets out to improve Christian-Jewish relations and in 1842 establishes the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, a group with the goal of witnessing "in the Church and in the world that God continues to be faithful to his love for the Jewish people." The organization, with sub-groups in many countries now, has for 160 years worked "to keep alive in the church the consciousness that, in some mysterious way, Christianity is linked to Judaism from its origin to its final destiny."
· REICH, Max. (1867- ) Born in Germany in 1867 and raised in England, where he converted to Christianity, Reich settled in America in 1915 and became an active member of the Hebrew Christian Alliance, the organization of Jews who accepted Christianity in its conservative evangelical form, which had just organized that year. He served as its president from 1921 until 1926 and again from 1935 until 1945. A Quaker by denominational affiliation, Reich nonetheless considered himself Jewish and took a strong interest in Jewish and Zionist affairs. He wrote poems that were published in the Hebrew Christian Alliance Quarterly and other organs of missions to the Jews, such as the Jewish Era. In his poetry, Reich expressed a Jewish Christian messianic hope and interpreted the rise of the Zionist movement as a significant event in the messianic time-table. His dispensationalist Jewish Christian outlook was also expressed in his biblical exegesis, as well as in a book dedicated to exploring the expected Jewish future within the messianic hope. In polemical articles, he expressed a view that was not shared by all in the conservative Protestant evangelical community, namely, that converted Jews should not disappear into the gentile society but rather retain their separate Jewish identity. He said, “Recently while at an open discussion of the book of Romans…I asked the question, ‘When a Jew becomes a Christian does he cease to be a part of Israel?’ The whole company almost shouted with one voice, ‘Yes.’ I then pointed out that it was the unbelieving branches who were cut off of their own olive tree. The believing branches remain where they had their origin. The olive tree represents the spiritual Israel rooted in the soil of the natural Israel…Gentiles …must not crowd out the branches that have never been broken off… God has always recognized an inner and outer Israel. The effective Israel was never more than a remnant at any time. And the inner was the salt of the outer, preserving it from decay. Hebrew Christians cannot fulfill their mission to their people unless they remain a part of Israel. The salt cannot do its work unless it mixes with that which is to be salted. ” In this passage, Reich justified the existence of Hebrew Christians as a separate entity within the Christian community by emphasizing the obligation this group had to evangelize its brethren. The role of Hebrew Christianity was thus presented to the larger evangelical community in missionary terms . Equipped with this ideology and sense of mission, Reich was a natural candidate for the position of professor of Jewish evangelization at the Moody Bible Institute. In 1940, he succeeded Solomon Birnbaum as Professor and Director of the Jewish Evangelism Program. That a major conservative Protestant institution of higher learning had hired Reich--a propagator of the uniqueness of Jewish Christianity and a writer of poems on the restoration of the Jews to Zion--to teach in the department of missions was in many ways remarkable and should be understood in the light of the Institute's distinctive dispensationalist theology. As a Professor of Biblical Studies, he also combated anti-Jewish propaganda, writing that "the so-called 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' was one of the basest forgeries ever fathered on the Jewish people. Jewish believers [in Messiah] will stand by their slandered nation at this time.... Jewish believers utterly detest the ... unscrupulous Jew-haters, who remain anonymous, bent on stirring up racial strife and religious bigotry."
· RESNICK, John was ordained as pastor andlabored under the Swedish Mission to the Jews in Jassy, Rumania. In 1912 his work became affiliated with the Chicago Hebrew Mission to free him from governmental restrictions.
RICH, Charlie (1899-1987?) A Hungarian Hassidic Jew who lived most of his life as a contemplative in a community of Jesuits in New York City. He wrote two books Reflections (Petersham : St. Bede Publications, 1986) and Autobiography (Petersham : St. Bede Publications, 1990 [ read more] at http://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/alljews.html#rich
· ROSEN, Moishe founds Jews for Jesus in 1973, saying that most workers in Jewish evangelism "sought the goodwill of the Jewish community and tried to avoid friction at all costs. Yet as soon as the missionaries' efforts began to be effective, the Jewish leaders reacted with a show of displeasure and accused them of insensitive or offensive methods." The real problem, he says, is "the offense of the cross, not insensitive methods. There was no way-however tactful, loving, and sensitive-to tell Jewish people that they needed Jesus without risking the displeasure of the Jewish community leaders. Having committed myself to the idea that disapproval and rejection were a normal part of Jewish evangelism, I taught my helpers that we all must bear the cross and risk rejection. Once we oriented ourselves to handle rejection, we began to win many Jews to the Lord."
· ROSENBERG, Joel C., after growing up in a Jewish household, starts an evangelistic Bible study group in his high school in 1984. He marries in 1990, joins McLean Bible Church (pastored by Lon Solomon), and becomes Rush Limbaugh's research director in 1994. Rosenberg, who has also been an advisor to Steve Forbes, Bill Bennett, and Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, now writes a column on politics for WORLD.
· ROTTENBERG, John First trained at theChicago Hebrew Mission, he became a pastor and later took charge of the Elim Society, Rotterdam, Holland, supported by the Church Mission to the Jews.
· SALIN, Lewis Henry, an immigrant to Kentucky who secretly read the New Testament in Germany before leaving there, heard a Baptist minister's call to go forward at the end of a service and professed Christ in 1852. "All my relatives, from my father to the remotest cousins, like a panorama passed through my mind," he later wrote. "I imagined I could hear them curse my very soul, while a frown of hot displeasure was resting upon each countenance.... The solemn and weighty words of our Savior, with greater force than ever, came rushing to my mind. 'He that loveth father or mother ... more than Me is not worthy of Me.'... With great difficulty I went forward and united my destiny with the Baptists." For the next 45 years he is a merchant and minister.
· SALKINSON, Isaac Edwardwho first translated classics like Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1870 into Modern Hebrew is a Messianic Jew. Over the next 15 years, while working as a missionary to Jews in Vienna, he translates into Hebrew Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and then labors for thirty years on his magnum opus…a much improved Modern Hebrew version of the the Greek New Testament. He died before its publication in 1883.
· SALVADOR, Moses Descendant of an old powerful Portuguese Jewish family - one of his ancestors had built Salvador House near the Royal Exchange in London - he was a wealthy and influential Jew in Amsterdam when he declared his faith in Yeshua as his Messiah in 1852 and later delivered public lectures on Christianity every Thursady to the dismay of the rabbis of the Portuguese synagogue.
· SAPHIR, Aaron Adolph, (1831-1891), born in Budapest, son of Israel Saphir, he was the nephew of famous humorist Moritz G. Saphir who became a Lutheran. When at age 12, he proclaimed at dinner to his family, “I found the Messiah!” and led them to Christ. His sister married the missionary in Berlin, Rev. Schwartz. Then he became a missionary to the Jews in Hamburg and held four Presbyterian pastorates in England where his expository lectures on the Old Testament became legendary from 1861 to 1888. He always remembers how up to age 12 he hoped for something more than the religion he was taught could give: "I was brought up in my childhood in the synagogue and taught that there was one God, infinite, incomprehensible, high above us and omnipresent. Much stress was laid on the unity and unicity of God. But this bare, vague, and abstract monotheism leaves the mind in darkness, while the heart is chilly and desolate." This puzzles Aaron, because in the Bible "I was met by no abstract idea of unicity but by a loving God, who appeared unto Abraham and spoke to him, who led Israel through the wilderness and dwelt among them. After, when I thought of the kindly, concrete, friendly and human way in which the Lord God then appeared unto His people and dwelt with them, I wondered why He was not now with us, loved and followed. One day I was looking at some books in my father's library and the title of one arrested my eye. It was Immanuel, God with Us. The thought went through my mind like a flash of lightning; it thrilled my soul. Oh, I exclaimed, if it were true that God should appear in human form, what a blessing that would be."
· SAPHIR, Israel. A merchant of Budapest, baptized in 1843, along with his wife, two sons, and three daughters.
· SCHENCK, Rob & Paul Chaim. In1995, Rob begins bringing teams of ministers and religious leaders to the nation's capital city to present congressmen and other government officials with tablets on which the Ten Commandments are etched. He and his twin brother, Paul Chaim Schenck, become Christians as teenagers during the 1970s and in 1992 lead Operation Rescue's attempt to shut down Buffalo's abortion businesses. Rob Schenck is arrested during the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York City for thrusting the corpse of an unborn child in front of Bill Clinton. Paul is arrested and imprisoned for violating an ordinance designed to protect abortion businesses, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturns that decision on free-speech grounds. In 2001, Rob Schenck is head of the Washington evangelical group Faith and Action, and Paul Schenck is a rector at Reformed Episcopal Church in Catonsville, Md.
· SCHERESCHEWSKY, Samuel Isaac Joseph(Lithuanian Jew, 1831-1906) Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky was born in Lithuania in 1831, went to Germany to study for the rabbinate, there became a Christian, emigrated to America, trained for the priesthood, and in 1859 was sent by the Episcopal Church to China, where he devoted himself from 1862 to 1875 to translating the Bible into Mandarin Chinese. In 1877 he was elected Bishop of Shanghai, where he founded St. John's University, the first Protestant college in China and began his translation of the Bible into Wenli (another Chinese dialect). He developed Parkinson's disease, was largely paralyzed, resigned his position as Bishop of Shanghai, and spent the rest of his life completing his Wenli Bible, the last 2000 pages of which he typed with the one finger that he could still move. Four years before his death in 1906, he said: "I have sat in this chair for over twenty years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted." http://satucket.com/lectionary/SIJSchereschewski.htm Known as one of the most learned Orientalists in the world, he also translates the Bible into both Mandarin and colloquial Chinese and stays at his translation tasks even though partially paralyzed and unable to speak.
· SCHWARTZ, Dr. C., Minister of Trinity Chapel along with eighty other Jewish Christians founded in 1866 the Hebrew-Christian Alliance, , the first concerted effort on the part of Jewish Christians to revive Jewish Christianity. From1866, he also became the editor of the first Jewish Christian periodical, The Scattered Nation. His missionary journeys in Germany were very fruitful.
· SEKULOW, Jay.Chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, successfully argues the Lambs Chapel case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993; the Court states that religious groups cannot be discriminated against in the use of public facilities made available to other groups. Sekulow appears before the Supreme Court numerous times in defense of religious freedom, and writes about his own religious liberation as he tried to understand the description of the "suffering servant" in chapter 53 of Isaiah: "I kept looking for a traditional Jewish explanation that would satisfy, but found none. The only plausible explanation seemed to be Jesus. My Christian friends were suggesting other passages for me to read, such as Daniel 9. As I read, my suspicion that Jesus might really be the Messiah was confirmed.... I'd always thought my cultural Judaism was sufficient, but in the course of studying about the Messiah who would die as a sin bearer, I realized that I needed a Messiah to do that for me."
· SHELDON, Louisformed the Traditional Values Coalition in 1980 , a group now with 45,000 affiliated churches that defends biblical principles in regard to abortion, homosexuality, and other controversial issues. He becomes a Christian as a teenager in the 1950s, after his older brother and sister (who had already converted) urge him to attend an evangelical service at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. He goes on to attend Princeton Theological Seminary and becomes a pastor in North Dakota and eventually in California. He quotes George Washington's farewell address ("Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports") and notes that "we're not going to have political prosperity separated from religious principles. And we can't have national morality separated from religious principles."
· SHULAM, Joseph Baruch (1946-) Born in Sofia, Bulgaria on March 24, 1946. His family immigrated to Israel in 1948, where they settled in Jerusalem. In 1962, he came to faith in Yeshua the Messiah. He was educated at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he received a B.A. in Bible and Bible Archeology. He later came to the United States and studied at David Lipscomb College in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received a B.A. in Chemistry and biblical Studies. Upon completion of his B.A., he returned to Israel where he has since been involved in the local Messianic Jewish community. He continued his studies at the Hebrew University, and received an M.A. in the History of Jewish Thought in the Second Temple Period. From 1972-1975, he studied Rabbinics and Jewish Thought at the Diaspora Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He is the Director of Netivyah Bible Instruction Ministry in Jerusalem. He established Netivyah, an Israeli-government recognized organization, for the purposes of studying and teaching the Jewish background of the Brit Ha'Chadashah (New Testament), providing a bridge between Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity, and nurturing the Messianic Jewish community in Israel. He is also the Elder of Congregation Roeh Israel, also located in Jerusalem. In addition to Biblical Studies, he lectures worldwide on such subjects as the First Century Church in Jerusalem, the Jewish Roots of the Brit HaChadashah, and contemporary Middle East politics. He was an adjunct professor at Abilene Christian University (ACU), and directed the ACU graduate extension program in Jerusalem in 1998. Netivyah ministries now sponsors Kol Ha’Yeshuah (the voice of salvation) a 24-hour Hebrew Messianic radio in Israel.
· SITENHOF, Benjamin, comes to believe in Christ by reading a Polish New Testament, and builds a refugee center in Danzig in 1923 (then a "free city" under the protectorate of the League of nations and gateway to the west from Eastern Europe). Supported by the Irish Presbyterian Mission, the center includes a home for the destitute along with a bookshop and auditorium.
· SOLOMON, Lon. Became senior pastor at McLean Bible Church just outside Washington, D.C. in 1980. Solomon's early drug and alcohol abuse stopped when he accepted Christ, and he goes on to Capital Bible Seminary, Johns Hopkins University, and then teaching Hebrew and Old Testament at Capital. Through preaching and his national So What? radio broadcast, he emphasizes reaching non-Christians and says, "I was born Jewish. I never listened to Christian radio. I was raised in the public-school system. I believed in evolution, relativism, and existentialism. Until I became a believer at 21, I had no intention of visiting a church.... So as a pastor I asked, How can my church reach 'me'"?
· SONNENFELS, Joseph von, a distinguished jurist in Vienna, lays out in 1782 the principles for the Edict of Toleration regarding Jews that Austrian emperor Joseph II announces.
· STAHL,Friedrich Julius. Battles socialist and anti-clerical influences in Germany as soon as the Communist Manifesto comes out in 1848, defending the Lutheran Church into which he moved from Judaism. He becomes the head of the Conservative Party in Prussia and, as a Berlin professor, opposes Hegelian philosophy, calling atheistic scientists to repentance.
· STEIN, Edith (1891-1942) St. Edith, born in 1891 as the youngest child of 11 in an Orthodox Jewish family. A Jewish student of philosophy from Breslau (then Germany), educated as an assistant to philosopher Edmund Husserl, converted after reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in 1921. The author of Finite and Eternal Being (an attempt to synthesize Aquinas and modern thought) and other highly regarded books, she became a Carmelite nun in 1933, joined by her sister Rosa. Nazis arrest them in 1942, and murder both in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "Come Rosa," Edith says as the Nazis are hauling them away from the convent. "We're going for our people." She was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1998. [ read more] at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0001.html
· STEINBERG, Joseph. What’s a nice Jewish boy doing asVicar in the Church of England? His testimony is available at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/steinberg.htm
· STERN, Henry Aaron(1820-1885), a flaming missionary to the 16,000 Jews of Baghdad, Persia, also to Constantinople, Arabia where the Jews were persecuted, the Crimea, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Abyssinia (Ehiopia) to the Falasha Jews where he suffered torment and imprisonment at the hands of the drunken King Theodorus from 1863 to 1868. "I was stripped and on the ground insensible," he later writes, "almost lifeless, with blood oozing out of scores of gashes, and I was dragged into camp." For 31/2 years he remains a tortured captive; he later writes, "Our nerves were horribly shattered, and our minds, too, would have been unhinged had not religion with her solacing influence, soothed the asperities and hardships of our existence." British troops rescue him and he returns to England for a lecture tour and publication of his memoir, The Captive Missionary. He then became head of the London mission of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews until he died.
· STERN, Karl, an emigrant from Nazi Germany to Canada, a noted neuropsychiatrist, and a convert to Christianity after years of study and contemplation, publishes in 1951 his autobiography, The Pillar of Fire. He writes that he realizes how Christians were elected by God to fulfill the vision of the prophets by spreading belief in Abraham's God throughout the world. He then sees the ups and downs of the Jewish people as part of a larger religious panorama. One of his McGill University post-war Jewish students, Bernard Nathanson, recalls him as "a great teacher; a riveting, even eloquent lecturer in a language not his own, and a brilliant contrarian spewing out original and daring ideas as reliably as Old Faithful. I conceived an epic case of hero-worship.... There was something indefinably serene and certain about him." When Nathanson reads The Pillar of Fire, he realizes that Stern "possessed a secret I had been searching for all my life, the secret of the peace of Christ."
· STONE, Nathanpublishes in 1944 Names of God in the Old Testament, a study showing that the attributes of God in the Old Testament belong as well to Christ as He is depicted in the New Testament. Stone becomes director of the Jewish missions program at Moody Bible Institute.
· TELCHIN, Stan. A successful Jewish businessman whose daughter challenged him
to read the Hebrew Scriptures. He became the author of international bestseller Betrayed. His testimony is available at http://www.shalom.org.uk/Testimonies/Betrayed!.htm
· THEOPHILUS succeeded Heros II as Bishop of Antioch. He was well read in Greek literature as is proved by his 3 books to Autolycus, a learned Gentile believer and governed the church of Antioch for 20 years until his death.
· TREMELLIUS, John Immanuel (1510-1580) was educated at the University of Padua, became a believer through the influence of Cardinal Pole. Soon after became a Protestant in Switzerland and a friend of the Reformers, settling in Strasburg as a Hebrew teacher. Finally he reached England as a refugee from the religious wars in Germany and found protection under Archbishop Cranmer. In 1549, he became Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. A strong Calvinist, later during Queen Mary’s reign, he became Professor of Theology at Heidelberg under Frederick III teaching at the College of Wisdom, where he produced a Latin Old Testament that was published in Frankfurt in the 1570s and London in 1580. With Theodore Beza's Latin New Testament attached to it, the Tremellius Bible was the Protestant contender against the Vulgate issued by Pope Sixtus V in a Reformation vs. Counter Reformation battle of Latin bibles. He also contributed with Ursinus and Olevianus, in the compilation of the Heidelberg Catechism, then continued at the College of Sedan back in England until his death. He translated the Bible from Hebrew and Syriac into Latin, Calvin’s Catechism and wrote a Syriac and Chaldee Grammar. Finally his Catechism for Enquiring Jews published in 1554 was still used as a missionary tool in the 19 th century.
· WARSZAWIAK, Hermann (1865-) born in Warsaw, the son of a well-known rabbi, head of the Hassidim. W hen sixteen years old, he married the daughter of a rich banker in Lodz, and went there to live with his wife's parents. As he hungered for the fulfillment of promises in Isaiah and Jeremiah, the direction of his preaching worried many and his family thought it best to send him back to Warsaw for a while, leaving wife and children behind. Then one day in Germany, driven by his spiritual hunger, he entered a church where a sermon was being preached by Daniel Edward, the Scotch missionary to the Jews. After three months of intense discussion and searching of the Scriptures in Hebrew with Edward, he finally came to the only conclusion possible: Yeshua was the promised Jewish Messiah! and was baptized in Breslau on 6 th October, 1889. The news of his baptism spread to Poland like wildfire, and Edward took him to Edinburgh, fleeing the anti-missionary backlash that was sure to come. After six months, his enemies had tracked him and he immediately left for America, where he devoted his efforts to reaching Jewish refugees in New York with the gospel. He proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah on Shabbat days to a small group of 16 that within 2 years swelled to groups of 300—800. His unusual ability to reply with but a few words to those who angrily did their best to disturb the services made him famous. He was put in charge of the Home for Persecuted and Inquiring Christian Jews in New York City and labored successfully there in spite of virulent attacks and false testimonies of local Jews like anti-Missionary A. Benjamin, an agent for the United Hebrew Charities who tried to prove Warzarviak and his teachers were hypocrites, who were carrying on their work only that they might get money from rich Christians. Many records of anti-missionary tactics are not unlike those today as shown by the archive records at the Digital Jewish Missions Project http://66.70.209.137/jmh/index.htm. A brief biography is available at http://66.70.209.137/jmh/warszawiak/twoyears.htm.
· WERIDNER, Paul. A learned Jewish convert (early 18 th century)
· WERTHEIMER, Max graduated in 1889 from Hebrew Union College and became the Rabbi of B’nai Yeshurun Synagogue in Dayton, Ohio. After serving for 10 years as a rabbi in Dayton, Ohio, and then dabbling in Christian Science when distraught following the death of his wife, publicly confesses Christ in Dayton's Central Baptist Church in 1904. He then goes to Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville and becomes a pastor. He recalls, "I had tried to get some tangible comfort out of the Talmud, Mishnah, and rabbinical doctrines, but found none that satisfied my soul's hunger and longings." In studying the New Testament, though, he sees that the Christian doctrines he had derided as illogical and un-Jewish are sensible and truly Jewish. He was disowned by his Jewish alma mater for the sole reason that he became a believer in Jesus. Later, he became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ada, Ohio.
· WEYLER,Samuel graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1891. An immigrant from Russia, he has made a living as a peddler in Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Missouri, everywhere trying to improve his English by listening to good speakers, including those in churches-and in that way he learns about Christ and chooses to follow Him. He becomes a minister in Colorado, Wyoming, and California.
· WOLFF, Joseph (1795-1862) Bavarian Jew, son of rabbi David Wolff, student of Oriental languages, became the pioneer missionary to the Jews in the Orient. Baptized in Prague in 1812, he resolves to become a missionary/explorer. He learns Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and other languages of west and south Asia and becomes a missionary to Jews in Persia, Turkistan, India, Arabia, and other lands. According to Lewis Way's Travels and Adventures of Dr. Wolff, he is one "to whom a floor of bricks is a featherbed and a box is a bolster; who travels without a guide, speaks without an interpreter, can live without food and pay without money, forgiving all the insults he meets with and forgetting all the flattery he receives. Such a man (and such and more is Wolff) must excite no ordinary degree of attention in a country and among people whose monotony of manner and habits has remained undisturbed for centuries."
· WURMBRAND, Richard. Founder of The Voice of the Martyrs, dies at age 91 in 2001. After becoming a Christian in Romania in 1936 and then a pastor, Wurmbrand and his wife are arrested several times by the Nazi government. He evangelizes Russian soldiers who are prisoners of war and does the same with Russian occupation forces after August, 1944. Communist leaders imprison Wurmbrand in 1948, subject him to physical and mental torture, threaten his family, and finally imprison his wife as well. She is released in 1953 and he in 1956, but he is re-arrested in 1959 and sentenced to 25 years for preaching Scriptures that are contrary to Communist doctrine. Political pressure from Western countries leads to his release in 1964. The Wurmbrand family leaves Romania in 1965 and begins informing the world about persecution of Christians in that country and elsewhere. By the mid-1980s The Voice of the Martyrs has offices in 30 countries and is working in 80 nations where Christians are threatened.
· XERES, John in 1709 counteracts the slur that converts are not well-educated in Judaism by emphasizing his Talmudic studies.
· XIMENES, Sir Moses (1762-?), English high Sheriff.
· YACHNIN, Esther, a 15-year-old New York City girl, converts to Christianity in 1911 and sets off a furious debate. Jewish groups lobby for a law making the proselytizing of minors without parental consent a crime. That legislative effort is not successful.
· YESHUA, the Messiahwas born of a virgin from the Jewish lineage of King David in Bethlehem. She was married to Joseph, also from the lineage of King David and they later had several sons, among them Jacob (James) the head of the first Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. He gathered 12 close disciples and started his ministry at age 30 in Galilee, Judea and Samaria. He performed many miracles and preached sermons to the lost sheep of Israel. Many believed he was the promised Messiah and hailed him as such as he entered Jerusalem for the Passover celebration at age 33. He was arrested by the Jewish authorities who incited Pontius Pilate to crucify him. An earthquake shook Jerusalem at the hour of his death and the Temple veil was torn. The glory of Israel departed the Temple, never to come back (The Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 by Emperor Titus’ army and all genealogical records able to recover Jewish ancestry were henceforth lost). After the initial shock, his followers witnessed him raised from the dead, speaking, encouraging and eating with them. They were also allowed to touch the wounds. They finally understood that He was indeed the Suffering Servant of Israel, the obedient Son of God sent as a silent lamb to atone for the sins of Israel and all of mankind, as prophesied earlier by John the Baptist and the prophet Isaiah (ch. 53). His resurrection from the dead was witnessed by many before he ascended back to His father in heaven to sit at His right hand while his enemies on the earth are subdued under his feet. His disciples under the guidance of the Holy Spirit began their apostolic mission, preaching from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth the good news of forgiveness of sins through Messiah’s atonement on the cross and victory over sin and death in his resurrection. The call to repentance and obedience of faith in Messiah reached Jews and Gentiles, growing rather than being extinguished under persecution . The church was first called the Way of Messiah and the members were Messianics (Hebrew) or Christians (Greek). Later, the World Calendar started over because of His birth. The lightning rise of the Messianic or Christian faith on the stage of history corroborates Yeshua’s saying before his death that , “Now it is time for the world to be judged. Now the prince of this world will be thrown out. But I am going to be lifted up from the earth. When I am, I will bring all people to myself." (John 12: 31-32.) The fact that judgment on the world is said to begin with the expansion of the Messianic faith reinforces the proclamation of the apostles in Acts 4:12 that “Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” after quoting Ps 118:22 “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief corner stone.” What David in the Spirit foresaw was also the testimony of the Lord to Isaiah: “Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and he who believes in him will not be disappointed.” (Isaiah 28:16) and “Then He shall become a sanctuary; But to both the houses of Israel, a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over, and a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 8:14). These with Ps 118:22, were quoted by Yeshua in Matt 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17 and later expounded by the apostles in Acts 10:43, Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:5-12, and Romans 9:30-33). These and more show that Messianic faith in Yeshua was from the start founded in the Hebrew Scriptures and not an invention of his disciples. Neither did it compromise the oneness of God (1 Timothy 2:5, Romans 3:30, Galatians 3:20). For further study, see The Messianic Prophecy slide-show. http://www.israel-pro.org/live_site/english/list_2_-eng-pps.html
· YOSEL’S HASID, a student of the famous Rebbe of Ger, had come in 1914 to the Pletzel (Jewish Quarter of Paris) and in 1920 was thrown out of the synagogue because they said a demon had taken possession of him: He had become an ardent believer in Yeshua. He said, “I have not become a goy, but am a true, completed Jew.”
· ZAMORA, Alfonso de. A former rabbi Spanish convert to Christianity, baptized in 1506. Working with Paul Nunez Coronel and Alfonso d'Alcala, two other Jewish Christians, he He became the key Hebraist among the Polyglot translators of the Bible during the Renaissance. using his knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldean, and other languages to help develop a six-volume multilingual work known as the Polyglot Bible. He also writes a Hebrew grammar, a Hebrew dictionary, a dictionary of the Old Testament, and a treatise on Hebrew spelling.
· ZEIDMAN, Morris becomes Superintendent of the Scott Institute in Toronto in 1926, which offers food and evangelism to both poor Jews and gentiles, and sponsors group homes for needy children. Then in 1938 with the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America, he appeals for help for the Jews and Jewish Christians of Poland, Germany, and Austria, where "sorrow is turning into despair. They can see no hope, not a gleam of light or kindness anywhere.... We must help, if we have to sacrifice a meal a day. Surely those of us who eat three meals a day can afford to spare the price of one meal for our persecuted brethren in Central Europe."
· ZION, Daniel (1887-1979) Born in Thessalonika, Greece, he was trained as a rabbi in his father’s yeshiva and sent in 1918 to serve the Jewish community of Sofia where he was elected the chief rabbi inBulgaria. Prior to WWII in the 1930s, though he never formally “converted” to Christianity, he started to believe in Yeshua and remained faithful to the Torah-keeping lifestyle. Read how Yeshua appeared to him three times in a vision, how his Messianic faith became a well-known secret in Sofia and how his friendship with Metropolite Stephen of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church affected his faith and saved Bulgarian Jews from complete extinction at http://www.netivyah.org.il/English%20Web/MidrashaArticles/rabbi_zion.html. He immigrated to Israel in 1949 with most of the Rabbinic remnant and was appointed as judge of the Rabbinical Court in 1954. When his faith in Yeshua was revealed, he was told that he could remain as long as he kept it a secret. Unable to comply, he spoke, “ I am poor and feeble, persecuted and vulnerable, Yeshua conquered me, and with the New Man he honored me, He delivered me from the poverty-stricken self with his great love, he cherished me. Every day the canny devil aspires to grab my faith, I hold on to my encourager, and chase the devil away. I stand here alone in my faith, the whole world is against me. I give up all the earthly honor for the sake of the Messiah my mate.” The Rabbinical Court striped Rabbi Daniel from his Rabbinical Title, but the Bulgarian Jews continued to honor Rabbi Daniel as their Rabbi. A Russian Jew who was one of the early Zionist settlers in Rishon LeZion, and had become a "believer", had given Rabbi Daniel Zion a building on Yeffet St. in the heart of Jaffa for a Synagogue. In that Synagogue Rabbi Daniel officiated until the 6th of October 1973. In this Synagogue Rabbi Daniel Zion did not often speak of Yeshua openly, but many times he brought stories and parables from the New Testament. However, each Sabbath after the Synagogue Rabbi Daniel would bring home a group of his fellow worshipers from the Synagogue and they would study about Yeshua and from the New Testament all the Sabbath after-noon until they would go back to the Synagogue to say the evening prayers. He died at age 96 leaving an indelible legacy by his personal example expressed in the acrostic poem of his name: The (Daver) Word of God is my path, The (Ner) Lamp of God is my guide, The (Iraat) Fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom, The (Ahavat) Love of God is my Life, The (Laasoth) Doing the will of God is my aspiration, (Zedek) Righteousness and Justice are my goals, His (Isurim) Suffering is my atonement, He will (OYagen) protect you in all your ways, The (Nezah) Eternal one of Israel is my comfort.
· ZOLLER, Israel, former Chief Rabbi of Rome (1881-1956) Chief Rabbi of Rome, helps to save about 4,000 Roman Jews as the Nazis enter Rome in 1943. Posing as a structural engineer, he enters the Vatican and asks Pope Pius XII to protect Rome's Jews. The pope makes churches, monasteries, convents, and the Vatican itself sanctuaries for them. Zolli publicly converts to Christ in 1945, saying, " I promised God in 1942 that I should become a Christian if I survived the war. No one in the world ever tried to convert me. My conversion was a slow evolution, altogether internal.... I am beginning to understand that for many years I was a natural Christian. If I had noticed that fact 30 years ago, what has happened now would have happened then." Asked why he has given up the synagogue for the church, Zolli replies, "I have not given it up. Christianity is the completion of the synagogue, for the synagogue was a promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise." Asked if he therefore believes that the Messiah-Christ-has come, he says, "Yes, positively. I have believed it many years. And now I am so firmly convinced of the truth of it that I can face the whole world and defend my faith with the certainty and solidity of the mountains." That is what he has to do, as Jewish leaders call him a heretic, excommunicate him, proclaim a fast of several days in atonement for his "treason," and mourn him as one dead. Zolli responds, "When my wife and I embraced the church we lost everything we had in the world. We shall now have to look for work: and God will help us to find some." God does, as Zolli becomes a writer and teacher. He became Eugenio Zoli after converting to the Catholic faith on February 14, 1945. He became a professor at the Pontifical Institute and entered the Third Order of St. Francis. He wrote The Nazarene and Why I became a Catholic (Catholic Bokks, 1953). Sister Margherita Marchione wrote a biography, Yours is a Precious Witness (New Ork: Paulist Press, 1977) and Judith Cabaud wrote another, Eugenio Zolli,Prophet of a New World (de Guibert, Paris 2000) [ read more] at http://www.salvationisfromthejews.com/alljews.html#zolli
The Caspari Center for Biblical & Jewish Studies is currently in the process of compiling a multivolume History of the Jewish Believers in Jesus from Antiquity to the Present : The Untold Story at http://www.caspari.com/jbj/