Jews and Jesus (part 1): Missionary Groups Strive to Blend with Jewish Mainstream

James Cowen is well-known around the Jewish community of Richmond, Va. Cowen, an active member of the local Jewish Community Center, was recently appointed to its membership committee.

He is also the “rabbi” of Tikvat Israel, Richmond’s self-described Messianic Jewish congregation, which is housed in an old synagogue building and offers Hebrew-language worship Friday nights and Saturday mornings.

Cowen and his 170 congregants wear traditional Jewish headcoverings and prayer shawls, read from a Torah scroll and pray to Yeshua, the Hebreq term for “salvation,” which they use to refer to Jesus.

Many of his congregants also belong to the JCC and a couple of the women belong to the local chapter of Hadassah, according to Cowen.

“We see ourselves as being part of the Jewish community and that’s our primary focus,” Cowen said in a recent telephone interview. He said he believes that it is unfortunate that many in the Jewish community “think we’re out to convert everyone and that they’ll lose their Jewishness.”

“The longer we’re around and show that we’re a viable Jewish organization, then we’ll be accepted,” he said.

“Messianic” Judaism, the view that Jews can believe that Jesus was the Messiah and still be fully Jewish, is not a new phenomenon.

What is relatively new, however, are the efforts of Cowen and others to become part of the larger Jewish community, to become an acceptable alternative to the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox movements.

Their strategy is two-pronged: to make worship as seemingly Jewish as possible and to blend into the Jewish communal mainstream.

“Their major near-term goal is to become accepted,” said Craig Miller, executive director of the Jewish Action Group, the American arm of Yad L’ Achim, an Israeli anti-missionary organization.

But Messianics’ beliefs about Jesus contradict the universal view of the Jewish community that the Messiah has not yet come.

“The reality is that they are an arm of the evangelical church to convert Jews – period,” Miller said. “Their theology is defined by a fundamentalist Christian agenda. This Messianic Judaism hides the Christian evangelical message in Jewish symbols.”

Most troubling about their efforts to blend in is that they are successful, said Miller, who himself belonged to one of Manhattan’s Messianic congregations for a few years.

“They are gaining credibility as a legitimate religious expression” of Judaism, said Miller, whose spiritual search led him first to Jews for Jesus and ultimately to Orthodox Judaism, through the outreach efforts of a Lubavitch rabbi.

Jewish culture and ritual have been woven together with Christian theology in a syncretic meld since the early 1970s.

Before then, the groups that existed were upfront about their connections to evangelical Christianity and called themselves “Hebrew-Christian,” according to those who have studied the movement.

The term “Messianic Judaism” was first used in 1972 and came into heavy use in the mid-1980s, experts say. Today, nearly all references to Christianity have been expunged from the names and promotional materials of missionary groups.

Among Messianics, efforts to blend in so that they can convert more Jews are on the rise because they believe that Jesus may return to earth at the turn of the millennium, said Rabbi Mark Powers, director of Jews for Judaism, an anti- missionary group based in Baltimore.

Yet this is not the first time missionizers have tried to become involved in the Jewish community. Similar efforts began in the mid-1970s, according to Carol Harris-Shapiro, a Reconstructionist rabbi whose doctoral dissertation examined a Philadelphia-based Messianic group.

When the Hebrew-Christians were discovered in local chapters of Hadassah and in Jewish Community Centers, they were kicked out, she said. As a result, they created their own parallel institutions.

Now using their own synagogues, day schools and social centers as a springboard, the Messianics are trying once more to dive into the Jewish community’s mainstream.

Many Jews mistakenly believe that “Jews for Jesus” is the name of all Messianic Jewish groups. It is one of hundreds of organizations and congregations working to blur the distinctions between the faiths.

The number of Messianic congregations has grown dramatically during the past two decades. In 1973, there were an estimated three such congregations in the United States. The number jumped to 30 in 1980 and 144 in 1994, according to news accounts.

A recent issue of the The Messianic Times, a newspaper that boasted significant growth as it marked its fifth anniversary this summer, listed 203 of these congregations in its directory.

There are also congregations in Canada, Australia, England, Holland, Israel and the former Soviet Union, where missionary groups are extremely active in recruiting converts.

The number of people sitting in the Messianic congregations is growing, too. A generation ago there were only a handful, say observers; today, there may be as many as 150,000, the Jewish Action Group’s Miller said.

Despite the tremendous growth, however, both critics and insiders of the movement agree that a relatively small percentage of participants are born Jews. Most of the congregants are non-Jews interested in the Jewish roots of Christianity, they say.

About 6,000 people in the United States would describe themselves as Messianic Jews or Hebrew-Christians, said both Miller and Susan Perlman, associate executive director of Jews for Jesus, based in San Francisco.

Given the relatively small number of adherents drawn from the Jewish world, why do these groups prompt so much concern in the Jewish community?

Because those numbers are steadily, albeit slowly, increasing, say those involved in countering the missionaries.

Each year, about 1,000 more Jews in North America begin to describe themselves as Messianic Jews, Miller said.

Richmond’s James Cowen is not the only one encouraging his congregants to join local Jewish organizations.

Perlman of Jews for Jesus is a member of the American Jewish Congress and has been a member of ORT.

Another Messianic Jew, Israeli-born Anat Bross, taught at two day schools and a Hebrew school program in Detroit until she was recently fired because of her affiliation.

And in Baltimore, members of the Messianic congregation Rosh Pina recently contributed $5,000 to the Jewish National Fund.

Israel has long been an issue around which the Messianics have rallied. Their staunchly pro-Israel activities “help them get close to Jews and makes the Messianic congregations much more acceptable to the Jewish community,” Miller said.

Such an approach is dangerous, said Rabbi Tovia Singer, an experienced anti- missionary worker who recently founded Outreach Judaism, another group that counters missionary activity.

Although they may support political goal as some Jews, “their agenda is not our agenda,” he said. “They want to convert us, and that is the bottom line.”

The Messianic congregations vary in their styles and practices. Some meet in mainstream churches and others have their own buildings complete with stained- glass windows with Jewish stars.

Some services consist of typically Christian prayers and worship styles with a patina of Hebrew terminology laid over it. Others conduct what appears to be a very traditional Jewish worship service, but weave in references to “Yeshua haMoshiach,” or Jesus the Messiah.

But not matter what the degree of apparent Jewishness, the bottom line is the same: belief that Jesus was sent by God to die for their sins.

Although their strategy of blending in to the community is not widely publicized, it is clearly outlined in their own literature and correspondence.

In some places, the work of the Messianics has spurred the Jewish community to work harder to reach Jews whose lives it has not touched.

But many agree that the time and effort spent courting unaffiliated Jews rarely matches the effort put forward by the Messianic groups.

Eight years ago, the flagship congregation of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, Beth Yeshua, or House of the Messiah, moved in a half-mile away from the Kaiserman Branch of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Philadelphia in Wynnewood, Pa.

“They started reaching out to the elderly, doing shopping for them, visiting the sick and passing themselves off as Jews who also believe in Jesus,” said Karen Small, the JCC’s program director.

The Messianic congregation, which draws between 250 and 300 people to Friday night services, has a preschool as well as an after-school program for older kids, Small said.

Neighborhood residents formed an outreach committee of their own and, five years ago, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia began funding a full- time outreach worker based at the JCC.

But the task of countering these groups is difficult, Jewish officials said.

“The insidious part about it is that it looks Jewish,” Small said. “Their building looks like a nice little synagogue.”