"You’ve helped us reach Budapest, Berlin and beyond!" David Brickner, Jews for Jesus in San Francisco, California, United States for Friday, 29 July 2016From David Brickner
Read David’s explanation about why some Jewish people will be mourning in August, and what it means for sharing your faith.Catastrophe and Communionby David Brickner Category: August 2016 Newsletter (5776:12) Published: July 25, 2016 Hits: 504
This month many Jewish people will join in mourning over an especially tragic date. According to Jewish tradition, Tisha b’Av—or the ninth day of the month of Av—is the date of destruction for both the first and second temples in Jerusalem. Religious Jews fast for the entire day or, in some traditions, eat only a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with ashes. No leather clothing or footwear is worn.
The ground where the temple once stood, now controlled by Muslims, remains the most provocative piece of real estate in the world. Extremists spread false rumors about Israeli intentions to occupy the Temple Mount, continually inciting young people to prove their loyalty to Allah by stabbing Jewish civilians. The ninth of Av therefore marks inexorable and ongoing temple-related tragedies for the Jewish people.
This is not how it was supposed to be. The temple was to be a symbol of hope for the Jewish people, carrying with it a promise of communion with God our creator, as voiced by Moses in his prophetic prayer:
“You will bring them in and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which You have made for Your own dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands have established.” (Exodus 15:17)
It was hundreds of years before this vision was fulfilled. King David longed to build the temple. He even bought the property on Mount Moriah—the very place where Abraham offered up Isaac—from a man named Ornan. But God would not allow David to build His house. Instead he appointed Solomon, David’s son, to build it. As the temple was dedicated and the people’s voices were lifted in praises to God, Moses’ prophecy was gloriously fulfilled. God came to dwell in His sanctuary.
“And it came to pass, when the priests came out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not continue ministering because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.” (1 Kings 8:10,11)
What a powerful moment! The temple became the center of Israel’s worship, the anchor of her religious sensibility, the certainty of her communion with God.
That temple stood for nearly 400 years. But over time, the people began to put their confidence in the structure rather than in the sovereign God. It was as though they thought they had His power magically harnessed within the building—even after they had turned to worshiping idols. God warned that judgment was coming and so it did, in 586 b.c., in the form of the Babylonian conquerors. Jerusalem was overrun by foes and the temple in all of its beauty was destroyed. Just as the building had been a symbol of spiritual communion with God, so its destruction was a physical reminder of the spiritual catastrophe of Israel’s idolatry.
Words can’t describe the agony of that destruction. Israel’s kishkes (guts) were ripped out. Her awareness of calling and purpose was rooted in that temple, and in the knowledge that God was in her midst. With no temple, there was no assurance of God’s presence or His provision of forgiveness. What was once a place of communion with God had been struck by catastrophe. The destruction of the temple and the corresponding exile were the most devastating judgments imaginable—but just as God predicted the judgment, so He planned the restoration.
In 538 b.c., Zerubbabel and a host of Israelites returned to Jerusalem, freed from captivity by decree of King Cyrus of Persia. The book of Ezra describes the building of the second temple. It took 23 years to complete yet it hardly compared to the elaborate beauty of the first. Herod attempted to restore the temple to some of its former glory.
Many of Jesus’ activities and some of His most controversial comments were witnessed in and around that restored temple. For example, “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body” (John 2:19–21).
Can you see what it meant for Jesus to identify Himself as the temple? In one brief statement He claimed to represent the very presence of God once so evident in the holy sanctuary. But Jesus also made an ominous prediction concerning that second temple that would authenticate what He had said about His own life and work.
“Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple, and His disciples came up to show Him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’” (Matthew 24:1,2)
Titus and his Roman legions fulfilled Jesus’ prediction as they marched into Jerusalem, destroyed the city and decimated the temple. Thousands of Jews had already placed their faith in Yeshua. But when this national tragedy pointed back to the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, thousands more realized He had spoken truly and trusted Him. For them, the catastrophe led to communion. Yet most of my Jewish people did not understand. And so it remains to this day.
The temple was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It was a symbol of hope for those who longed for the presence of God.
Tweet
The temple was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It was a symbol of hope for those who longed for the presence of God, yet only one person, the High Priest, was allowed to actually enter the Holy of Holies. Jesus, holiness incarnate, made that presence accessible to ordinary folks when He walked on the earth—and He made an astounding promise to His disciples before He left. The Father would send the Spirit to dwell with them and in them (see John 14:15–18). And to this day, He dwells in you and in me and in all who have been reconciled to Him through Jesus. But God’s ultimate promise to “tabernacle in our midst” is still to come!
The amazing description of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation includes all kinds of lavish imagery, including jewels and crystals and various symbolic structures—yet John did not see a temple in the city, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Revelation 21:23). His presence will be there—the Shekinah glory—without any of the surrounding barriers that the temple symbolizes.
This month, as many Jewish people mourn the catastrophe of the temple’s destruction, we who know Messiah Jesus long to share our Great Hope with them. The day is coming when we will be gathered around the throne, worshiping the One who is Himself the holy temple. That will be a day of unimaginable joy for all who have been reconciled to God and to one another through Jesus—the day when we will finally and fully know true, unbroken and everlasting communion.
The rest of this newsletter edition is available by pdf. It includes bits from our branches in New York City, Israel and Washington DC, articles on Jewish evangelism in India, a surprising look at an atheist, “For Your Jewish Information,” a cartoon, and of course prayer prompters. Enjoy!
David Brickner is also an author, public speaker and avid hiker. Find out more about David, his writings, speaking schedule and possible availability to speak at your church.
Watch this month’s video on how God has blessed our outreaches in Budapest, Berlin, and Camp programs for kids and teens.
Top Stories
Urgent prayer needed for believers in Russia
Find out why so many Israelis are talking to us in Berlin, and how a Muslim met the Jewish Messiah!
News from the Berlin campaign!Category: RealTime July 2016
Aaron Lewin (Berlin branch leader) inviting Israelis to post their thoughts on peace
From day one of the Berlin campaign, God has been answering prayer!
Daniel reports: “I was feeling bad that people weren’t taking my tracts when an Israeli approached me and said, ‘I’ve heard about Yeshua!’ (Jesus). Just then, an older Israeli couple tried to persuade Moshe* not to speak with me. It didn’t work! Moshe gave me his contact information and the next day we met in a coffee shop. I showed him some messianic prophecies and he was surprised, receptive and eager to read more Scripture. Please pray for Moshe as I meet with him again during the campaign.
Igal (a missionary with Christian Witness to Israel, working in partnership with our Jews for Jesus team in Israel) reports: “From the first day of the campaign, Israelis have been stopping us in the street when they see our bright T-shirts with the question, “Who is He?” in Hebrew. By the end of the first day, five Israelis had given me their contact information to hear more about Yeshua.”
Campaign leader Aaron reports: “I got into the hotel elevator with a man I’d overheard speaking Hebrew. I started making small talk with him and he asked what our T-shirts meant—then he said he’d seen our stickers all around town! As I explained who we were and what we believe, he listened attentively—then suggested that we and our families meet up while he is in Berlin. Please pray for him as we continue the conversation.
“The Israeli outreach team spent a whole afternoon at Alexanderplatz—a vast public square with market stalls, live music and shops. We used our homemade chalkboards, post-it notes and evangelistic literature to invite people to answer the questions, ‘What is peace to you?’ and ‘Who can bring peace?’ Many people posted their answers on our chalkboards. We had non-stop conversations from the moment we arrived, and were able to share the gospel with people of all cultures and identities.
“Our Israeli flag drew both positive and some negative responses. It was particularly touching when two young Muslim women wrote on our board, “Peace is—Jews and Muslims deserve to live.” The sincerity in their eyes was profound. Others wanted to take photos with the Israeli flag or with the chalkboard. Igal, a local Israeli, was very open to hearing the gospel, and gladly received a New Testament in Hebrew. Please pray for me to have continuing ministry to Igal and many others from the local Israeli community as I build our branch here. And please pray for all of the people who are stopping to speak to us, that their search for peace would lead them to the only one who can give what they truly need.”
Laura Barron reports: “One morning there were very few people passing by our sortie (tract-passing expedition) site. So when I saw a young man sitting alone on a bench, I sat next to him. Martin* was a university student from a Turkish, nominally Muslim, background. He told me he had been to a church while studying in England, and wondered if Jesus might truly be the Savior. I explained the gospel to him and he prayed right there on the bench to receive the Lord! He is eager to be in touch with believers from Berlin and to start reading the Bible right away. Please pray for Martin* to grow in his new faith.
*not their real names
Our campaigners are feeling God’s answers to your prayers—please keep interceding for them!
The ground where the temple once stood, now controlled by Muslims, remains the most provocative piece of real estate in the world. Extremists spread false rumors about Israeli intentions to occupy the Temple Mount, continually inciting young people to prove their loyalty to Allah by stabbing Jewish civilians. The ninth of Av therefore marks inexorable and ongoing temple-related tragedies for the Jewish people.
This is not how it was supposed to be. The temple was to be a symbol of hope for the Jewish people, carrying with it a promise of communion with God our creator, as voiced by Moses in his prophetic prayer:
“You will bring them in and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which You have made for Your own dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands have established.” (Exodus 15:17)
It was hundreds of years before this vision was fulfilled. King David longed to build the temple. He even bought the property on Mount Moriah—the very place where Abraham offered up Isaac—from a man named Ornan. But God would not allow David to build His house. Instead he appointed Solomon, David’s son, to build it. As the temple was dedicated and the people’s voices were lifted in praises to God, Moses’ prophecy was gloriously fulfilled. God came to dwell in His sanctuary.
“And it came to pass, when the priests came out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not continue ministering because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.” (1 Kings 8:10,11)
What a powerful moment! The temple became the center of Israel’s worship, the anchor of her religious sensibility, the certainty of her communion with God.
That temple stood for nearly 400 years. But over time, the people began to put their confidence in the structure rather than in the sovereign God. It was as though they thought they had His power magically harnessed within the building—even after they had turned to worshiping idols. God warned that judgment was coming and so it did, in 586 b.c., in the form of the Babylonian conquerors. Jerusalem was overrun by foes and the temple in all of its beauty was destroyed. Just as the building had been a symbol of spiritual communion with God, so its destruction was a physical reminder of the spiritual catastrophe of Israel’s idolatry.
Words can’t describe the agony of that destruction. Israel’s kishkes (guts) were ripped out. Her awareness of calling and purpose was rooted in that temple, and in the knowledge that God was in her midst. With no temple, there was no assurance of God’s presence or His provision of forgiveness. What was once a place of communion with God had been struck by catastrophe. The destruction of the temple and the corresponding exile were the most devastating judgments imaginable—but just as God predicted the judgment, so He planned the restoration.
In 538 b.c., Zerubbabel and a host of Israelites returned to Jerusalem, freed from captivity by decree of King Cyrus of Persia. The book of Ezra describes the building of the second temple. It took 23 years to complete yet it hardly compared to the elaborate beauty of the first. Herod attempted to restore the temple to some of its former glory.
Many of Jesus’ activities and some of His most controversial comments were witnessed in and around that restored temple. For example, “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body” (John 2:19–21).
Can you see what it meant for Jesus to identify Himself as the temple? In one brief statement He claimed to represent the very presence of God once so evident in the holy sanctuary. But Jesus also made an ominous prediction concerning that second temple that would authenticate what He had said about His own life and work.
“Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple, and His disciples came up to show Him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’” (Matthew 24:1,2)
Titus and his Roman legions fulfilled Jesus’ prediction as they marched into Jerusalem, destroyed the city and decimated the temple. Thousands of Jews had already placed their faith in Yeshua. But when this national tragedy pointed back to the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, thousands more realized He had spoken truly and trusted Him. For them, the catastrophe led to communion. Yet most of my Jewish people did not understand. And so it remains to this day.
The temple was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It was a symbol of hope for those who longed for the presence of God.
Tweet
The temple was never intended to be a permanent fixture. It was a symbol of hope for those who longed for the presence of God, yet only one person, the High Priest, was allowed to actually enter the Holy of Holies. Jesus, holiness incarnate, made that presence accessible to ordinary folks when He walked on the earth—and He made an astounding promise to His disciples before He left. The Father would send the Spirit to dwell with them and in them (see John 14:15–18). And to this day, He dwells in you and in me and in all who have been reconciled to Him through Jesus. But God’s ultimate promise to “tabernacle in our midst” is still to come!
The amazing description of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation includes all kinds of lavish imagery, including jewels and crystals and various symbolic structures—yet John did not see a temple in the city, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Revelation 21:23). His presence will be there—the Shekinah glory—without any of the surrounding barriers that the temple symbolizes.
This month, as many Jewish people mourn the catastrophe of the temple’s destruction, we who know Messiah Jesus long to share our Great Hope with them. The day is coming when we will be gathered around the throne, worshiping the One who is Himself the holy temple. That will be a day of unimaginable joy for all who have been reconciled to God and to one another through Jesus—the day when we will finally and fully know true, unbroken and everlasting communion.
The rest of this newsletter edition is available by pdf. It includes bits from our branches in New York City, Israel and Washington DC, articles on Jewish evangelism in India, a surprising look at an atheist, “For Your Jewish Information,” a cartoon, and of course prayer prompters. Enjoy!
David Brickner is also an author, public speaker and avid hiker. Find out more about David, his writings, speaking schedule and possible availability to speak at your church.
Watch this month’s video on how God has blessed our outreaches in Budapest, Berlin, and Camp programs for kids and teens.Top Stories
Urgent prayer needed for believers in Russia
Find out why so many Israelis are talking to us in Berlin, and how a Muslim met the Jewish Messiah!
News from the Berlin campaign!Category: RealTime July 2016
Aaron Lewin (Berlin branch leader) inviting Israelis to post their thoughts on peace
From day one of the Berlin campaign, God has been answering prayer!
Daniel reports: “I was feeling bad that people weren’t taking my tracts when an Israeli approached me and said, ‘I’ve heard about Yeshua!’ (Jesus). Just then, an older Israeli couple tried to persuade Moshe* not to speak with me. It didn’t work! Moshe gave me his contact information and the next day we met in a coffee shop. I showed him some messianic prophecies and he was surprised, receptive and eager to read more Scripture. Please pray for Moshe as I meet with him again during the campaign.
Igal (a missionary with Christian Witness to Israel, working in partnership with our Jews for Jesus team in Israel) reports: “From the first day of the campaign, Israelis have been stopping us in the street when they see our bright T-shirts with the question, “Who is He?” in Hebrew. By the end of the first day, five Israelis had given me their contact information to hear more about Yeshua.”
Campaign leader Aaron reports: “I got into the hotel elevator with a man I’d overheard speaking Hebrew. I started making small talk with him and he asked what our T-shirts meant—then he said he’d seen our stickers all around town! As I explained who we were and what we believe, he listened attentively—then suggested that we and our families meet up while he is in Berlin. Please pray for him as we continue the conversation.
“The Israeli outreach team spent a whole afternoon at Alexanderplatz—a vast public square with market stalls, live music and shops. We used our homemade chalkboards, post-it notes and evangelistic literature to invite people to answer the questions, ‘What is peace to you?’ and ‘Who can bring peace?’ Many people posted their answers on our chalkboards. We had non-stop conversations from the moment we arrived, and were able to share the gospel with people of all cultures and identities.
“Our Israeli flag drew both positive and some negative responses. It was particularly touching when two young Muslim women wrote on our board, “Peace is—Jews and Muslims deserve to live.” The sincerity in their eyes was profound. Others wanted to take photos with the Israeli flag or with the chalkboard. Igal, a local Israeli, was very open to hearing the gospel, and gladly received a New Testament in Hebrew. Please pray for me to have continuing ministry to Igal and many others from the local Israeli community as I build our branch here. And please pray for all of the people who are stopping to speak to us, that their search for peace would lead them to the only one who can give what they truly need.”
Laura Barron reports: “One morning there were very few people passing by our sortie (tract-passing expedition) site. So when I saw a young man sitting alone on a bench, I sat next to him. Martin* was a university student from a Turkish, nominally Muslim, background. He told me he had been to a church while studying in England, and wondered if Jesus might truly be the Savior. I explained the gospel to him and he prayed right there on the bench to receive the Lord! He is eager to be in touch with believers from Berlin and to start reading the Bible right away. Please pray for Martin* to grow in his new faith.
*not their real names
Our campaigners are feeling God’s answers to your prayers—please keep interceding for them!
Find Out
What happened to Jewish Believers in Jesus in Nazi Germany (a great pass along article for a Jewish friend)
What Happened to Jewish Believers in Jesus in Nazi Germany?by Judith Mendelsohn Rood Category: Issues Volume 21 Number 5 Hits: 2624
Judith Mendelsohn Rood is Professor of History and Middle East Studies, Department of History , Biola University.
Memories
My father and his family escaped from the Holocaust. Growing up, I eavesdropped on my grandmother’s conversations with my father about those dark days, and their powerful memories began to transform my dreams. My grandmother told and retold her stories about the event known as Kristallnacht throughout her life. So unforgettable were her memories, so inconceivable these events, that they became my own.
Only following the death of his mother in 2006 at the age of 97, did my father begin telling his own recollections of the night that he and my grandmother fled Europe under fire from the embattled port of Rotterdam.
Jews and Jewish Christians in Modern German History
Until I began teaching about the Holocaust at Christian colleges and universities, I had no idea that many of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were professing Christians. I was aware that many German Jews had converted to Christianity, especially beginning in the eighteenth century. I knew this because of my family’s name—Mendelsohn—and my own family history. The famed Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn initiated and epitomized the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, which marked the beginning of Jewish emancipation and assimilation into German society. However, three of his children became Christians, as did his most illustrious grandson, composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
I have often thought of Jewish believers in Jesus sitting in the pews with their church friends in Nazi Germany, suddenly expelled from their seats because they were labeled “Jewish.” I wondered, How did they feel?
Generally, the topic of Jewish Christians and the Holocaust has been neglected in Holocaust Studies. The study of this field is essential for Christians and Jews to understand this dimension of the Holocaust.
The Churches and German Nationalism
On September 27, 1817, Frederick William III (1797-1840) unified the Reformed and Lutheran churches. This ecumenical, liberal church was universalist, romantic, and nationalist—the highest expression of the German people and Western civilization. Many modern thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, found this universalist message very attractive. During the eighteenth century, led by philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a new movement of Jews embraced the Enlightenment view that faith is a private matter and that religious identity should play no part in civil society. This Reform view enabled “enlightened” Jews to become modern “Germans.”
Assimilation into the Church was the Jewish convert’s expectation, based upon the universalism preached by liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth century. However, Jews were forced to surrender their ethnic identity and cultural distinctiveness in order to gain admittance into the Church.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews turned to Jesus as Jewish redeemer and the universal savior, intermarrying with non-Jews, and assimilating into the German nation. At the same time, many Germans, reacting against the hated “Jewish” influences on the Church and German nation, had begun to relocate the origins of German Christianity in pagan, not Jewish, culture.[1] During the post-World War I era, Germany’s state church—the Evangelical Church—was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies.
Historian Victoria Barnett explains that in the popular mind, “[T]he Jews were blamed for a number of crises, even when their purported role in one would logically eliminate their role in another.”[2]Eventually, the “German Christians” cut the Old Testament out of their Bibles and excised the “Hebraisms” out of the New Testament. Yet all the while, even in this poisoned theological atmosphere, Jews continued to profess faith in Jesus.
Beginning in 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.
Barnett points out that Hitler and other leading Nazis, despite their opportunist claims to the contrary, “were hardly religious,” but used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction from the leaders of the Protestant Church.”[3]
Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews were bound together. But the tendency of most Germans, including those within the church, was to put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. Left to themselves, Jewish Christians formed their own groups.
Theresienstadt
Professor Kai Kjaer-Hansen has written about some of these groups in Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic. During the war, Theresienstadt was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp. My great-grandparents, Jenny Mendel Moses and Alexander Moses, died in that ghetto of dysentery and starvation in 1942.
Here is a portion of Kjaer-Hansen’s account:
From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.
Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.
Hans Werner Hirschberg arrived at Theresiendstadt on February 10, 1944. He survived and later wrote,
One tenth of the Jews who had been interned there belonged to a Christian confession. Some were Protestants, some Catholics. Among these Jews, there was a group of Evangelical Jewish Christians from Holland, four hundred in number that distinguished themselves. They even had a Jewish Christian pastor with them. Many of our ‘church members’ had, although they had been baptized, never really considered being followers of Jesus until they came to Theresienstadt. But here, under the influence of God’s word, many of them were truly converted. Jews who had been Christians in name only became true Christians. Many Mosaic Jews and Jews who had no faith whatsoever found Jesus and were saved in Theresienstadt I am one of the few survivors from the concentration camp in Theresienstadt. Most of my brothers went home to be with the Lord. But my Saviour saved me out of this camp so that I might proclaim the wonderful things that He performed among those who were in “the valley of the shadow of death”
Arthur Goldschmidt’s parents had converted to Christianity in 1858. After Goldschmidt, born in 1873, had to resign his post as a judge in Hamburg in 1933, he devoted himself to his hobby as a painter. His wife Kitty, who was a baptized Jew, died in June 1942.
One month later Goldschmidt was deported to Theresienstadt. Here he founded an evangelical congregation where he preached and administered pastoral care. He survived in the ghetto. Before his death on February 9, 1947, he wrote down an account of the evangelical congregation in Theresienstadt. Here are a few glimpses from the account that was published in 1948.
On the first Sunday in the ghetto, Goldschmidt and another man get together in an attic and read the New Testament which he has brought. The word gets about, and others join them the following Sundays. No more than twenty persons can assemble without permission. “What was I to do?” He realizes that the administration was not likely to appreciate the formation of a Christian congregation in a Jewish town, and without the consent of the Jewish council of elders he could not proceed.
Goldschmidt continues: “So I turned, nonetheless, to Mr. Edelstein, who was then the leader of the Jewish council, and described the state of affairs to him. When he was informed of the fact that an evangelical congregation had already been founded, he was astonished but also full of understanding. The good God is ultimately the same, and to him, Edelstein, it is the same in which way he is honoured.” Both sides realize that the room where the Mosaic Jews worship cannot be used.
On October 18, 1942, they get the first and semi-official recognition of the congregation as a room with electrical light, used as a variety theatre and a lecture hall, is made available for them by the council of elders. And the congregation grows. Between 150 and 200 attend the services, at the festivals there are even more.
Goldschmidt does not hide that, from time to time, there were some difficulties with the council of elders. But the following words are nevertheless remarkable: “In retrospect it must be admitted that this administration of what was intended as a pure Jewish society, which naturally would see a Christian congregation as a foreign body, in general has been very obliging.” Here is an example: Christian German Jews cannot celebrate Christmas without a Christmas tree, which is difficult to come by. Again in Goldschmidt’s words: “Finally the SS permitted us to have a small tree, which would be decorated by the women; not even candles, a much desired rarity donated from all sides, were missing.” But then listen to how Goldschmidt continues: “The last year the Christmas tree was cynically forbidden by the SS man who had to make the decision. But then, fortunately, the Jewish administration saw to it that an artificial tree with inserted branches and with multicoloured electrical lamps was made for the service!”[4]
Theresienstadt serves as a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the Jews in Nazi Germany believed in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. And they suffered and went to their deaths along with their fellow Jews.
1Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998).
2Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 126.
3Ibid., p. 124.
4Kai Kjær-Hansen, “With Hans Walter Hirschberg and Arthur Goldschmidt in Theresienstadt,”Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism Eighth International Conference Proceedings (Lake Balaton, Hungary 19-24 August 2007, 23 August 2007), http://lcje.net/papers/2007.html
Excerpted from: Judith Mendelsohn Rood, 2014, pp. 411-448. Between Promise and Fulfillment, Shoah/Nakbah: Offerings of Memory and History. In History (1933-1948): What We Choose to Remember. University of Portland: Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture. See [link].
What happened to Jewish Believers in Jesus in Nazi Germany (a great pass along article for a Jewish friend)
What Happened to Jewish Believers in Jesus in Nazi Germany?by Judith Mendelsohn Rood Category: Issues Volume 21 Number 5 Hits: 2624
Judith Mendelsohn Rood is Professor of History and Middle East Studies, Department of History , Biola University.
Memories
My father and his family escaped from the Holocaust. Growing up, I eavesdropped on my grandmother’s conversations with my father about those dark days, and their powerful memories began to transform my dreams. My grandmother told and retold her stories about the event known as Kristallnacht throughout her life. So unforgettable were her memories, so inconceivable these events, that they became my own.
Only following the death of his mother in 2006 at the age of 97, did my father begin telling his own recollections of the night that he and my grandmother fled Europe under fire from the embattled port of Rotterdam.
Jews and Jewish Christians in Modern German History
Until I began teaching about the Holocaust at Christian colleges and universities, I had no idea that many of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were professing Christians. I was aware that many German Jews had converted to Christianity, especially beginning in the eighteenth century. I knew this because of my family’s name—Mendelsohn—and my own family history. The famed Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn initiated and epitomized the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, which marked the beginning of Jewish emancipation and assimilation into German society. However, three of his children became Christians, as did his most illustrious grandson, composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
I have often thought of Jewish believers in Jesus sitting in the pews with their church friends in Nazi Germany, suddenly expelled from their seats because they were labeled “Jewish.” I wondered, How did they feel?
Generally, the topic of Jewish Christians and the Holocaust has been neglected in Holocaust Studies. The study of this field is essential for Christians and Jews to understand this dimension of the Holocaust.
The Churches and German Nationalism
On September 27, 1817, Frederick William III (1797-1840) unified the Reformed and Lutheran churches. This ecumenical, liberal church was universalist, romantic, and nationalist—the highest expression of the German people and Western civilization. Many modern thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, found this universalist message very attractive. During the eighteenth century, led by philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a new movement of Jews embraced the Enlightenment view that faith is a private matter and that religious identity should play no part in civil society. This Reform view enabled “enlightened” Jews to become modern “Germans.”
Assimilation into the Church was the Jewish convert’s expectation, based upon the universalism preached by liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth century. However, Jews were forced to surrender their ethnic identity and cultural distinctiveness in order to gain admittance into the Church.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews turned to Jesus as Jewish redeemer and the universal savior, intermarrying with non-Jews, and assimilating into the German nation. At the same time, many Germans, reacting against the hated “Jewish” influences on the Church and German nation, had begun to relocate the origins of German Christianity in pagan, not Jewish, culture.[1] During the post-World War I era, Germany’s state church—the Evangelical Church—was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies.
Historian Victoria Barnett explains that in the popular mind, “[T]he Jews were blamed for a number of crises, even when their purported role in one would logically eliminate their role in another.”[2]Eventually, the “German Christians” cut the Old Testament out of their Bibles and excised the “Hebraisms” out of the New Testament. Yet all the while, even in this poisoned theological atmosphere, Jews continued to profess faith in Jesus.
Beginning in 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.
Barnett points out that Hitler and other leading Nazis, despite their opportunist claims to the contrary, “were hardly religious,” but used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction from the leaders of the Protestant Church.”[3]
Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews were bound together. But the tendency of most Germans, including those within the church, was to put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. Left to themselves, Jewish Christians formed their own groups.
Theresienstadt
Professor Kai Kjaer-Hansen has written about some of these groups in Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic. During the war, Theresienstadt was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp. My great-grandparents, Jenny Mendel Moses and Alexander Moses, died in that ghetto of dysentery and starvation in 1942.
Here is a portion of Kjaer-Hansen’s account:
From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.
Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.
Hans Werner Hirschberg arrived at Theresiendstadt on February 10, 1944. He survived and later wrote,
One tenth of the Jews who had been interned there belonged to a Christian confession. Some were Protestants, some Catholics. Among these Jews, there was a group of Evangelical Jewish Christians from Holland, four hundred in number that distinguished themselves. They even had a Jewish Christian pastor with them. Many of our ‘church members’ had, although they had been baptized, never really considered being followers of Jesus until they came to Theresienstadt. But here, under the influence of God’s word, many of them were truly converted. Jews who had been Christians in name only became true Christians. Many Mosaic Jews and Jews who had no faith whatsoever found Jesus and were saved in Theresienstadt I am one of the few survivors from the concentration camp in Theresienstadt. Most of my brothers went home to be with the Lord. But my Saviour saved me out of this camp so that I might proclaim the wonderful things that He performed among those who were in “the valley of the shadow of death”
Arthur Goldschmidt’s parents had converted to Christianity in 1858. After Goldschmidt, born in 1873, had to resign his post as a judge in Hamburg in 1933, he devoted himself to his hobby as a painter. His wife Kitty, who was a baptized Jew, died in June 1942.
One month later Goldschmidt was deported to Theresienstadt. Here he founded an evangelical congregation where he preached and administered pastoral care. He survived in the ghetto. Before his death on February 9, 1947, he wrote down an account of the evangelical congregation in Theresienstadt. Here are a few glimpses from the account that was published in 1948.
On the first Sunday in the ghetto, Goldschmidt and another man get together in an attic and read the New Testament which he has brought. The word gets about, and others join them the following Sundays. No more than twenty persons can assemble without permission. “What was I to do?” He realizes that the administration was not likely to appreciate the formation of a Christian congregation in a Jewish town, and without the consent of the Jewish council of elders he could not proceed.
Goldschmidt continues: “So I turned, nonetheless, to Mr. Edelstein, who was then the leader of the Jewish council, and described the state of affairs to him. When he was informed of the fact that an evangelical congregation had already been founded, he was astonished but also full of understanding. The good God is ultimately the same, and to him, Edelstein, it is the same in which way he is honoured.” Both sides realize that the room where the Mosaic Jews worship cannot be used.
On October 18, 1942, they get the first and semi-official recognition of the congregation as a room with electrical light, used as a variety theatre and a lecture hall, is made available for them by the council of elders. And the congregation grows. Between 150 and 200 attend the services, at the festivals there are even more.
Goldschmidt does not hide that, from time to time, there were some difficulties with the council of elders. But the following words are nevertheless remarkable: “In retrospect it must be admitted that this administration of what was intended as a pure Jewish society, which naturally would see a Christian congregation as a foreign body, in general has been very obliging.” Here is an example: Christian German Jews cannot celebrate Christmas without a Christmas tree, which is difficult to come by. Again in Goldschmidt’s words: “Finally the SS permitted us to have a small tree, which would be decorated by the women; not even candles, a much desired rarity donated from all sides, were missing.” But then listen to how Goldschmidt continues: “The last year the Christmas tree was cynically forbidden by the SS man who had to make the decision. But then, fortunately, the Jewish administration saw to it that an artificial tree with inserted branches and with multicoloured electrical lamps was made for the service!”[4]
Theresienstadt serves as a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the Jews in Nazi Germany believed in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. And they suffered and went to their deaths along with their fellow Jews.
1Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998).
2Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 126.
3Ibid., p. 124.
4Kai Kjær-Hansen, “With Hans Walter Hirschberg and Arthur Goldschmidt in Theresienstadt,”Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism Eighth International Conference Proceedings (Lake Balaton, Hungary 19-24 August 2007, 23 August 2007), http://lcje.net/papers/2007.html
Excerpted from: Judith Mendelsohn Rood, 2014, pp. 411-448. Between Promise and Fulfillment, Shoah/Nakbah: Offerings of Memory and History. In History (1933-1948): What We Choose to Remember. University of Portland: Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture. See [link].
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RealTime delivers breaking news and views on Jewish evangelism, as well as inspiring perspectives from executive director David Brickner. Check back often for the latest updates. You'll find reasons to praise — and opportunities for prayer.
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