Missionaries gain ground

ANDY LEVY-AJZENKOPF CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS

Julius Ciss calls them “Hebrew Christians.” Ciss, executive director of the Toronto chapter of Jews for Judaism, is referring to Christian missionary groups that have made it a specialized practice within the evangelical community to target unaffiliated or “assimilated” Jews who are searching for a spiritual connection to the world.

Of particular concern to Jews in the Toronto area, Ciss said, is a group called Chosen People Ministries (CPM), a rival to the Jews for Jesus organization. This group, he said, uses quasi-Jewish propaganda to great effect to lure susceptible Jews away from even a nominal connection to their Jewish roots and toward the acceptance of “Messiah Yeshua” – aka Jesus.

CPM recently announced that it’s nearing the final stages of building its new Toronto Messianic Centre and national headquarters on Bridgeland

Avenue, just west of the Yorkdale Mall. For the past 15 years, it has operated out of a small house on Sheppard Avenue, between Yonge and Bathurst streets.

Ciss said the group has refined its pitch to Jews over the years, creating spaces where the Gospel is preached in a Jewish cultural atmosphere that makes it easier for Jews to believe they’re staying true to their roots while being taught that they can only be “saved” by accepting Jesus.

Jews for Judaism’s primary mission is to prevent groups such as CPM from recruiting Jews.

A reformed Jew for Jesus member himself – he said he spent several years in the organization before realizing he’d made a “horrible” mistake – Ciss said the methods used by the various missionary groups are specifically designed to break down psychological barriers that many Jews have erected against Christian proselytizing.

“These are basically churches operating under the guise of a Jewish patina,” Ciss said. “Their presentations can be very deceptive to an assimilated Jew who is looking for spiritual alternatives.”

For instance, one of the ways missionaries get Jews to attend services is, instead of holding them on Sundays like other churches, they will instead “ask you to visit their ‘synagogue’ on Shabbat. And that has a totally different, Jewish ring to it.”

Instead of referring to the New Testament, the missionaries refer to the “Brit ha’Chadashah” – the Hebrew translation for the name of the Christian Bible – and instead of asking Jews to accept Jesus as their lord and savior, they ask them to accept “Yeshua ha’Mashiach [Jesus the Messiah],” he said.

In their presentation to Jews, Ciss said, these groups have “altered, renovated and distorted all of Christian terminology, customs, symbols and traditions to make them look Jewish in order to make [Jews] feel less inhibited at considering Christianity as an option.”

Ciss said it’s his understanding that CPM is the second-largest group of its kind in the world, next to Jews for Jesus.

Rabbi Michael Skobac, Jews for Judaism’s director of education, said the ministries have an increasingly vigorous mandate.

“Chosen People Ministries has become increasingly aggressive in the last few years,” he said. “They opened a centre in Sderot [Israel] and another in the heart of the Jewish community in Flatbush, N.Y. Their successes are our [communities’] failures.”

Skobac said the typical profile of the converted Jews he encounters is of those who grew up in traditional Jewish households and went to Jewish school but say they never experienced Judaism in a spiritual way.

“They say they only ever experienced it as a heritage or tradition that didn’t resonate as a vibrant, spiritual path [and] didn’t involve building a personal relationship with God,” which this Christianity offers them, he said.

Jews for Judaism keeps an inventory of missionary groups operating in Canada. According to their records, there are some 100-plus such organizations now in Canada, the majority of which are based in southern Ontario.

Ciss suggested that it is intermarried couples that are particularly at risk. When it comes to raising children and how to make a marriage work, missionary groups “are very good” at making both partners feel spiritually comfortable by blending Christianity and Judaism together to make them feel harmonious. But the reality is very different, he said.

“There’s nothing about Christianity that Judaism can accept, which is why [Jews] reject the entire premise and why, as a people, we’ve never accepted the claims of Christianity. But today, these missionary groups are making Jews feel that it’s kosher.”

It’s only recently that the groups have made more inroads in the Jewish community, he said, likely because of growing rates of assimilation and intermarriage.

“The reality is, let’s be honest, a Jew who is assimilating is not interested in wearing a yarmulke or keeping Shabbat or wearing tzitzit … and many Jews are even converting to Christianity through the mainstream evangelical churches. The Jewish community is not aware of how great the problem really is. They’re not aware of the scope.”

Ciss worries that the Jewish community is blind to the phenomenon because it’s not happening in the public sphere but is occurring much more on the Internet.

“Just because the community doesn’t see the missionaries on the street corners” doesn’t mean the missionizing isn’t happening, Ciss said.

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