While Miriam Gurin[1] was born in Israel and Gemma Blech did Aliyah decades ago, both women have something in common that is particular to only a small minority of the Jewish population of Israel: they believe in Jesus, in Hebrew called Yeshua, as the Jewish Messiah that was announced in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). This exertion of their freedom of belief doesn’t only affect their standing among the Jewish population but brought or has the potential to bring serious troubles to their daily lives.
[1] Name changed.
Even though most Israelis aren’t aware of these conflicting situations, stories like those of Blech being brought to court, Gurin taking into consideration of losing her job if her faith becomes known, David Friedman[1] and his friends being confronted by members of Yad L’Achim (an anti-missionary organization in Israel) outside their prayer meeting, their acquaintances and other members of the congregations included in Serner’s study, touch upon one of the most controversial questions surrounding the Jewish State: How to define Jewishness and belonging to the Jewish people.
Especially in the context of the current escalation of the Middle East Conflict, the challenges Jesus-believing Jews may face among their fellow members of the Israeli society or coming from the Israeli administration itself confronts the question of Jewishness from a different angle. Although this phenomenon slowly becomes more broadly known among Israeli society, many Israelis this author talked to either don’t know of their existence or can’t imagine how being Jewish and believing in Jesus would not be mutually exclusive.
[1] Name changed.
“I got this letter telling me that I was being taken to court and I was going to lose all my rights.”
“As a believer in Yeshua, you have to be wise!” Gurin explains that openly living her faith in Israel will have serious consequences of which people like her need to be aware. She is a native Israeli in her 60s and a follower of Jesus for about 40 years now. Asking not to be cited by her real name, she shares about life decisions she has to take only because of her faith.
Being openly a believer may affect her career path, exempt her from deserved promotions, close doors of professional or social contacts for good, or have negative influence on the company she professionally represents. Blech on the other hand, testifies of what may happen to Jews following Yeshua as she had to go through a judicial procedure only because fellow political activists in her Zionist group found out about her faith. “I got this letter telling me that I was being taken to court and I was going to lose all my rights.” She was excluded from her political activities right away.
Thankfully for her, this happened when there weren’t many of those special welcome rights for Olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel) left for her. She had obtained her citizenship that couldn’t be taken away from her anymore. This is why she didn’t respond to the letter informing her about a court hearing. “My sin was that I had tried to give a Bible to an under 18, a minor,” although she assures that this accusation was made up. Regardless of this, her being found out as a believer had a strong effect on her daily life.
For years, Gemma was not only an active member of the activist group Women in Green, she has also been their main photographer. “We had a demonstration every week about something on the streets, quite big, quite upfront and I would do the pictures.” This post was then taken from her without even letting her know. In the aftermath of her court hearing, posters were distributed in schools and synagogues of the neighborhood with her face, name and address on it warning that she is a dangerous contact especially for children and youth.
“40 percent of the Messianic congregations experience some sort of harassment”
This experience parallels an account David Serner found as part of his and his colleagues’ research published in the book “Jesus-Believing Israelis: Exploring Messianic Fellowships” (conducted and written by David Serner & Alexander Goldberg, published by the Caspari Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies, Jerusalem: 2022). He tells of a Messianic (term often used to describe Jesus-believing Jews although it’s not completely congruent) pastor of whom “posters with him, with his face and his name (were put) on all the bus stations between Tel Aviv and the town where he lived; with posters of him saying that he’s a dangerous man and you would avoid him by all means.” He makes clear that even public figures like the “vice mayor of Jerusalem participate in big demonstrations against the Messianic community.” Some of their events are accompanied by groups of people “standing outside and shouting, some of them also a little bit violent.”
In his research, Serner distinguished between “mild harassments (that) would be things that are still legal but still harassment like people standing outside congregation halls and trying to convince people not to go into the congregation,” and “severe harassment that is actually breaking the law or borderline breaking the law like a stone through a window, like stealing all the equipment in the congregation, knives being drawn, threats on lives and threats on the kids.”
He says that, “in some cases they had to move the congregation service outside of the city more than a Shabbat mile because the Orthodox community couldn’t go there (on Shabbat).” Next to her own story, Blech gives the example for the “mild” but still serious harassment of a friend of hers, the mother and money maker of a family of believers, “and the Haredi discovered she was a believer, and they really did make it very nasty. She lost her job.” She thinks that, “they can threaten you, of course they all threaten you. They’re going to throw you out and take away your rights and do all these things, but it’s all hot air. But it can be very unpleasant. It was very unpleasant when it happened to me.”
Shockingly, Serner gives the account of an incident that was a lot more than “hot air.” One of the most serious examples of “severe harassment” happened in 2008 when a pastor in Ariel received a bomb in a post package. His son actually opened the delivery and was almost killed. According to Serner’s findings, “40% of the congregations experience some sort of harassments.” And “if you are a Hebrew speaking community, the incidence of severe harassment is much higher than in any other (Messianic) community.” He explains that this religious group is less protected than the institutional churches because there is no pope or bishop that may raise international awareness and draw attention or help them in a more influential network.
“You will be denied solely because of the faith in Jesus.”
In this context, the question of what it means to be Jewish becomes socially and legally tangible. Gemma Blech made Aliyah in her 50s, now 37 years ago. When she went through the process, she was aware of the difficulties Jews with a religious orientation like hers might encounter while assuming their inherent rights granted by the Jewish State. But thankfully for her, the question of her faith did not come up during her interview. In those days, there was no publicly available internet through which private information might be shared on Social Media. Today, this has become even more difficult.
“So if you are already a believer in Jesus, even though your grandmother or her mother survived the Holocaust or was in one of the of the concentration camps, if you yourself believe in Jesus, it is very hard to make Aliyah,” Serner explains. “You will be denied solely because of the faith in Jesus.” In 1989, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in a precedent that Messianic Judaism constituted a different religion than mainstream Judaism. This provided the grounds on which Jesus-believing Jews were legally denied to make Aliyah according to the Law of Return as they supposedly chose to follow another religion. Since 2008, the Supreme Court maintains that believing in Yeshua can’t lead to denial of Israeli citizenship if the person has proof of Jewish descendance.
However, some of them still face difficulties when applying for immigration. “They come with the papers and they ask to bring the papers again and again and again. It just drags out for years and years and years,” Serner cites experiences. According to Gurin, this has to do with the fact that the Ministry of Interior that controls visa and immigration is run by the Shahs, a Sephardi-religious political party. In this context it is “easy to denounce people.”
“As a Jew you can believe in anything, Buddha, Hare Krishna, but not Jesus.”
Even while the ruling of the Supreme Court that designated Messianic Judaism being a different religion was still upheld, many Jesus-believing Jews would never consider themselves being anything else than Jews. Serner found in his research that “people that come to (Messianic) faith will not say that they convert, they will oppose it fervently” because “they will say that they found themselves to become true Jews.” He explains that members of those congregations distinguish themselves strongly from the world-wide established churches of the orthodox, catholic and protestant denominations.
One of the biggest differences is that many of these congregations keep observing the Jewish holidays and not the Christian ones and live a broadly much more Tanakh-conform lifestyle than many secular Jews whose Jewish identity wouldn’t be questioned. Gurin echoes this statement. “As a Jew you can believe in anything, Buddha, Hare Krishna, but not Jesus,” she says. Also Blech declares, “I never call myself Christian ever.” But this wouldn’t convince those who made sure she was excluded from her Zionist activism. “The implication was you’re a believer in Yeshua, which by definition then makes me, in their book, not a legitimate Jew,” she remembers.
“You can look at the harassment in two different ways and the Messianic community does look at it in two different ways. Some say, we have complete freedom because 60% of the congregations experience no harassment whatsoever, right? This is good. We are in a free country. They’ll have that view because they’ve never experienced any kind of harassment. Then you will have the other one that says harassments should be at 0, right? And within these 40% you have severe cases that are life threatening and I cannot live in certain areas where I want to live because of my faith. There are problems, we are under persecution. So you can look at it in different ways and both ways are true.” (David Serner)
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