eChurch Christian Blog

Daphne Anson:

They’re really pulling out all the stops these days – those perverse Christians who seem to detest the existence of Israel. Last week the Quakers’ headquarters in Manchester hosted both Israel-basher Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz and – like so many Christian places of worship up and down the British Isles – Rod Cox’s notorious Israel-demonising exhibition of children’s drawings from Gaza. “Greenbelt”, a four-day musical festival at Cheltenham Racecourse that began this past weekend, organised by Christian groups with a pro-Palestinian agenda including Christian Aid and – fresh from their June call to boycott produce from “illegal” West Bank settlements – the Methodists, asks the 12,800 people attending to “confront the stark contrast” between the festival and the “day-to-day life” of Gazans.

Replacement theology and Successionism is undermining Israel, and many Christians have been seduced by Naim Ateek, founder of the Palestinian Christian organisation Sabeel, who denies that the “Old Testament” justifies Zionism and has made conflicting statements regarding Israel’s right to exist. Churches have produced one-sided reports about the situation in the Middle East that depict Hamas as a charitable organisation, completely overlooking its terrorist credentials and its antisemitic genocidal Charter. There’s even a tendency in some quarters to twist reality for political purposes and depict Jesus as a Palestinian rather than as a Judean. In London both the Bloomsbury Baptist Church and St James’s Church, Piccadilly, hold carol services in conjunction with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with the words to well-known carols altered to demonise Israel.

And so on.

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Some good news coming out of Israel relating to Messianic persecution:

Rosh Pina Project – Chief Rabbi of Efrat: Messianics in Israel face prejudice and discrimination

YNetNews

Some 15,000 Messianic Jews currently live in Israel, but if you saw one on the street you would almost certainly fail to recognize any difference. They honor Jewish circumcision, bar-mitzvah, and wedding ceremonies, but believe Jesus is the messiah.

The small community of Yad Hashmona, near Jerusalem, is home to a number of Messianic-Jewish families. They believe in Jesus – or Yeshua, as they call him – and in the teachings of the New Testament as well as the old. They are Jews in every sense, but for the most part keep this side of their faith to themselves. When these families gather for the Shabbat meal, however, Jesus is the guest star at their table.

Around 350,000 Messianic Jews live in the US, and one would be just as hard-pressed to recognize them there as in Israel. Some are Orthodox, and dress as the haredim do, while others are traditional and wear a yarmulke or no religious symbol at all. They are for the most part Zionists, and see IDF service as a top priority. In the army they serve as pilots, commanders, and elite unit members, but usually make sure to keep their messianic beliefs under wraps.

The fact that Jesus was Jewish is generally agreed upon, but what happened after his death is subject to rancorous theological debate. History books tend to recall the first century as a time of rebellion and prophets in Jewish antiquity, and this was also Christianity’s first chapter, bringing about pre-historic inter-religious quarreling and anti-Semitism.But in separating between Jews and Christians, history largely ignores the story of those Jewish people who believed Christ was the messiah and continued this tradition well after his death – the ancestors of the Messianic-Jewish faith in modern times.

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ArtDaily

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says the refusal of Romania’s central bank to withdraw a coin with an image of a prime minister who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II is “insensitive” to the memory of Holocaust victims.

The Anti-Defamation League also condemned the decision and urged President Traian Basescu Friday to ensure that information about the anti-Semitic actions of Miron Cristea is included with each coin.

The museum in Washington, D.C., said Cristea’s tenure as Romania’s premier from 1938 to 1939 “marked the opening of a systematic campaign of anti-Semitic persecution by successive Romania governments that resulted in the devastation of the Romanian Jewish community during the Holocaust.”

“We are shocked and disappointed that the National Bank of Romania has decided to honor Miron Cristea, even after consideration of his anti-Semitic actions and statements,” Anti-Defamation League director Abraham H. Foxman said.

As prime minister, Cristea was responsible for revising Romania’s citizenship law, stripping about 225,000 Jews — or 37 percent of the nation’s Jewish population — of citizenship.

Some 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma, or Gypsies, were killed during the pro-fascist regime of dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was prime minister from 1940 to 1944 and executed by the Communists in 1946.

Only about 6,000 Jews live in Romania today.

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Fascinating piece from Daphne Anson today looking at Judaism, Israel and Zionism.

As a comment on my previous post reminds me, one of the many ways in which Israel’s enemies attempt to undermine the Jewish State is by denying a connection between Judaism and Zionism.  So, in order to prick that particular anti-Zionist bubble, I’ve decided to post this survey of the Zionist idea in Jewish thought.  It’s based on something I once prepared for a class of students.

In the Bible, the Promised Land is frequently called Canaan, the territory west of the River Jordan which was promised by God to Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people (he is depicted here by the great Jewish artist and Zionist E. M. Lilien, who lived from 1874 to 1925).  The land given to Abraham as part of the Covenant he made with God is described in Genesis (15:18) as “from the river of Egypt unto … the river Euphrates”, but other biblical passages draw less extensive boundaries, as in Numbers (34:1-15), where God describes the land of Canaan to Moses, and Judges 20:1, where the land stretched from “Dan even to Beersheba”.

The land possessed by the ancestors of the Jewish people was at one time divided into the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judah).  The size of the land varied in biblical times, being at its largest during the reigns of King David and King Solomon.  The holiness of the land (ha-Aretz; whence Eretz Israel=”Land of Israel”) is an integral part of Jewish tradition, which holds that the land was first sanctified by Joshua’s conquest.  However, when the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land and drove its inhabitants into exile (often referred to as the Babylonian Captivity), the land lost its holiness and was resanctified following the Israelites’ return from captivity.  This second sanctification is generally considered by the rabbis to have endured through the centuries.

During the Babylonian Captivity the exiles pined for the Promised Land.  Their anguish found eternal expression in Psalm 137:1-6, evoked by dispossessed Jews throughout the ages: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ….”

The term Zion (“landmark” or “sign”) was first used of Mount Zion, one of the hills of Jerusalem, upon which in very ancient times a tower stood making it visible from a vast distance.  Eventually the term was widened to be applied also to the Temple in Jerusalem (the Jews’ principal place of worship, first built by King Solomon and reconstructed by King Herod), to Jerusalem itself, and to the whole of Eretz Israel.  Zion became synonymous with the spiritual centre of Judaism.  “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3).  Zion is regarded as the dwelling place of the Shekinah (“divine presence”), and traditional (Orthodox) Judaism teaches that with the coming of the Messiah Zion will be illuminated by God’s glory, and from there divine gifts will issue forth.

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