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JEWS Who Choose JESUS.
On a stifling night in early July, several hundred "Messianic," or Jesus-believing, Jews and their gentile Christian colleagues assemble for the opening night of "Messiah '93." Held on the campus of Messiah College, nestled in the rolling hills outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, this week-long annual conference of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA) attracts an estimated 2,000 faithful to its seminars, concerts and revival meetings. Tonight, the program includes some rousing welcoming speeches, a Messianic folk-rock concert by Kol Simcha and an earsplitting violin recital form a Messianic believer named Maurice Sklar. The climax of the evening, however, comes as Robert Cohen, Messianic "rabbi" of Jacksonvillle, Florida, and an MJAA executive committee member, takes the stage. A self-professed ex-Communist revolutionary, ex-drug addict and ex-occultist, Cohen is now a devoted follower of Yeshua ha-Moshiach - Jesus the Messiah.
"Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished!" he shouts, quoting the prophet Ezekiel. "This is the bankruptcy of modern Judaism: the hope is cut off [Jews] don't believe there is a God!" Behind him, spanning the width of the stage, stands a replica of Jerusalem's Western Wall, with a luminous Star of David superimposed on its center. "Forget about Yeshua," he continues. "First we gotta talk about God." He shouts again: "The hope is cut off! Because of the Holocaust and because of what has happened in 2,000 years of history!"
Cohen's sermon, like much of "Messiah '93," is a bewildering - and to most Jews, repugnant - hodgepodge of Jewish symbols and Christian beliefs. For the past two decades, the Messianic Jewish movement's evangelists have worked zealously to dissolve the strict boundary lines that have separated Judaism and Christianity for nearly to millennia. For Messianics, the New Testament is a Jewish book; their acceptance of Jesus as Messiah is viewed not as a betrayal of Judaism, or even as a Christian conversion, but as a return to the one authentic "Jewish faith."
While many people associate Jesus-believing Jews with the highly confrontational evangelistic organizations called Jews for Jesus, that group is merely the most visible - and among Jews the most reviled - of an estimated 150 groups that specifically target Jews for conversion. Jews for Jesus is almost...