Jews for Jesus car in Bondi Sydney Australia outside the Jewish shop
Jews For Jesus in Australia and Where Can You Find Jews For Jesus in Australia
What does a Rabbi have to say about Jews for Jesus in Australia?
First off, I apologize for the title of this blog post “Jews For Jesus in Australia and Where Can You Find Jews For Jesus in Australia,” and for mentioning it again here. Because it is important to say Jews for Jesus in Australia a few times to get this page found in the search engines. I just hope that any Jew G-d forbid searching for Jews for Jesus in Australia may find my page and learn something about real Judaism before they are polluted with junk.
Well, I’ve long known that they unfortunately are operating in Australia. I do wish they’d go perhaps to Indonesia instead. With a population of 250 million people there and maybe a dozen Jews, they’d have a hard time finding any Jews.
My first encounters in Australia with Jews for Jesus, Messianic Jews, or whatever one calls them, was as a Rabbinical Student in Sydney. Some of these missionaries had gone through the Jewish neighborhoods in the Eastern Suburbs dropping off books, something about “The Real Messiah,” on the door steps of any house with a mezuzah. One of the yeshivah boys having discovered this, mobilized a unit to go and collect as many books as they could before the home-dwellers ever got to them. Having collected a few hundred books, they made a bonfire in a garbage can and burnt them.
A few years later I was part of a group of Rabbis and educators who attended a two-day seminar on how to counter missionaries targeting Jews and how to deal with Jewish people who have, G-d protect us, fallen into one of these groups.
An organization called “Jews for Judaism,” works hard at countering the Jews for Jesus. Unfortunately the Jews for Jesus organization have a lot of money and human resources which makes it challenging working against them.
The most bizarre occurrence for me with a messianic Jewish organization was in Tokyo, Japan. I walked out of the train station in downtown Tokyo, and some guy wearing a big Jews for Jesus t-shirt handed me a brochure in Japanese and English. Now really, how many Jews are they going to convert in Japan?
Anyway, I got to thinking of all this because a friend of mine took this photo a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what they needed for the Judaica shop in Bondi.
It’s important that we know these guys are operating and that we must be prepared to deal with them.
4 Responses to “Jews For Jesus in Australia and Where Can You Find Jews For Jesus in Australia”
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- Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s new book “Kosher Jesus” | Travelling Rabbi - [...] My last post was about Jews for Jesus in Australia. My friend Rabbi Eli Cohen in Sydney has been ...
It’s amazing that Baptists spend $700,000 just to convert one Jew to being Baptist. Imagine – if we spent even a fraction of that kind of money to reach out to our own people, how many Jews would be more informed of and involved in their Judaism, instead of being sucked into these cults…
i read this one, thank you for this and the other interesting reads.
i’ve encountered different kinds of messianic jews so far, and my appreciation for each of them is different. there are those who practice judaism and just happen to believe that Jesus is the messiah (as in, comparing themselves to those who believe Rebbe Schneerson is the messiah) but don’t evangelize at all, and those don’t bother me at all; on the other hand you have J4J who are absolutely aggressive and are nothing but evangelical christianity at its finest with a thin veneer of Fiddler on the Roof. they truly unnerve me, and i wish they’d go away. i regularly get mail from them, and yay! paper to start the bbq! once in a close town i met with some of them and two christians because there was a desire to get a jewish bible study going, to learn about traditional commentaries and such which i thought was good, to get some ppl educated. but as you may guess it turned into an evangelization meeting before the whole thing even took of, i was just disappointed/angry/i should have known.
but one thing: someone like me, who is almost 100% jewish but can’t lay the hands on the paperwork (family is from germany and everything got destroyed; most of the family perished you-know-where and after that, being jewish was a well-kept dirty little secret i only found out several years ago, grew up totally atheist), someone like me is welcome by J4J but not by the local synagogue. i am welcome to go to the offices, and i sit them through, loving them yet feeling lost trying to navigate through the orthodox liturgy (it being all in hebrew is ok, i learned some at uni) and frequently geeting lost, looking at the people around me to imitate them, with some smiling at me but nobody talking to me or my kids, except for one kid who invited my kids for Talmud Torah, and when we got there, the door was slammed shut because i’m not jewish enough.
i guess ppl like me are easy prey for J4J because we, i, need to have a home and if at the synagogue you don’t feel overly welcome, one might be tempted to give them a try, with all their love-bombing. i like reading the new testament, but it’s more like a fiction book with a couple uplifting lines, but i can’t buy the god-man-human-sacrifice tale, or the trinity. it makes me feel sick and revolted. so what if you’re jewish with nowhere to go? i don’t wanna go to J4J for sure -eek- but being jewish without a community is living living on the top of mount everest; it can be okay for the time of a trek, but constantly living in thin air is not good for one’s health.
sorry for the long post and rant, but i’m feeling so discouraged right now and feel like i have nothing left.
First off, thanks for sharing your thought and feelings. It must be hard to be in your situation and I hope and pray that please G-d things get easier.
It’s always bothersome when I hear of a Jewish community that is cold, because I’ve travelled the world and have met so many beautiful warm and welcoming Jewish communities. I’ll sometimes hear from someone how they went to a Chababd house and had an unfortunate time, and I tell them of the hundreds of Chabbad houses I’ve been to that have been incredible.
We must keep in mind that one bad experience in one place, in one situation, does not always reflect the entirety of something.
I’ve gotten sick drinking fruit juice on the street in a third world country, though I will not stop drinking fruit juice, because I’ve had hundreds of positive fruit-juice-drinking- experiences
Unfortunately you live in an area by the sounds of it with a limited variety of Jewish community. If you were in Montreal (were I grew up) there are easily over a hundred synagogues to choose from. And you would no doubt find one where you feel comfortable.
As for Jews for Jesus being open and welcoming, weather they are acting as a hard evangelical group or being more passive, please keep in mind that they are not very successful in ever converting a Jew. Why do I say this? Because to convert you must have something to begin with to convert from. As you express within your self, would there be a welcoming Jewish community you’d not be a part of Jews for Jesus. From what I’ve seen around the world, the people Jews for Jesus and any other similar group attracts, are people who don’t have much to begin with. Any one with a strong Jewish foundation will laugh in their face. They know this as well. And you will find that Jews who are involved with them G-d prevent this, have unfortunately never explored much depth in their Judaism.
Please G-d I hope you find an opportunity to explore and express Judaism and experience the warmth and love that it holds.
Beware: J4J aren’t the only ones out there trying to convert Jews! I recently found a site (www.qaraims.com) that is trying to convert Jews to Islam!