By Charles Gardner, UK Correspondent
It is hardly surprising when Jews the world over — pilloried and persecuted for millennia — express their longing for peace and security. It’s a cry of the heart that was heard through many of the magical musicals of the 20th Century that came to be known as the Great American Songbook.
Many of the composers and lyricists were Jewish and I believe it was significant that, on the eve of the Holocaust in 1940, Yip Harburg, whose Jewish parents immigrated to the United States from Russia, won a Hollywood Oscar for his song Over the Rainbow, composed by Harold Arlen and famously sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz:
“Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high
There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
If only that dream could have been realised for the six million poor souls who perished in Germany’s concentration camps while the world looked the other way.
But now such dreams are becoming more tangible despite the exponential rise in global antisemitism. For even ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews — traditionally opposed to Christian teaching — are discovering that Yeshua (Jesus) is really their Messiah after all who assures them of a future hope in this world as well as eternal peace in the next.
It is now estimated that there are over a million believers of Jewish descent within the worldwide church, representing 6% of all Jewish people (compare that with just 1% of Japanese people, for example).
And Jewish evangelists within the Jews for Jesus movement are noting that ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews are gathering to listen to them as they take to the streets. As reported in their September newsletter, one of them recently stayed behind after his friends left shaking their heads, listening with rapt attention and even taking notes.
Evangelist Elisha Lazarus, co-host of the So Be It! YouTube channel, got chatting with him but was surprised when he returned a month later. On this occasion Elisha was joined by other YouTube evangelists (from Highway 53 and One for Israel) all filming in Jerusalem and talking to folk from the Haredi community.
The overall response was amazing, but what was most surprising was that their ‘superfan’ knew all their names. “He knew who we were, he was familiar with our videos and had heard our conversations. And now he was excited to see not just one, but all three of us in person.”
It all points to a deeper work that God is doing behind the scenes. I had a similar experience in Morecambe Bay on our way back from the Keswick Convention when we got chatting to an Orthodox family from Manchester, the father of whom said he recognised my name from the Israel Today (www.israeltoday.co.il) site run by Messianic Jews in Jerusalem. It appears he had been reading what their community has long regarded as ‘forbidden material’. Something very significant is stirring the hearts of God’s ancient people.
Jews have been following Jesus throughout the centuries, but persecution by the institutional church raised a tragic barrier to belief. Nevertheless, thousands of ‘Jewish Christians’ shared the fate of their fellow Jews in the death camps.
Others, like Johanna-Ruth ‘Hansie’ Dobschiner, discovered Jesus through Christians who stood by them. After watching her parents and brothers carted off to the camps, the young nurse somehow managed to escape the Nazis through a series of incidents that owed much to her extraordinary presence of mind, which included faking appendicitis and ‘diagnosing’ scarlet fever in a family she was accompanying onto the death train.
Hansie’s family were among 100 000 Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust. She too almost gave herself up rather than continue to endure the mental torture of being constantly hunted down. Fortunately, she was able to go into hiding under the protection of a Dutch pastor and duly discovered the glorious reality of Jesus from a complete Bible which, of course, included the New Testament.
She committed her life to Christ and came to believe that, by so doing, “a Jew became spiritually complete”.
Tragically, the pastor, Bastian Johan Ader, was arrested, tortured and shot by the Nazis, but he never betrayed a single name of those he had been protecting. Hansie wrote: “He died to secure my life in this world. Christ died to secure it in the next. Life here and life eternal by the shedding of blood.”1
She married a Scotsman, Donald Douglas, and came to live in Glasgow, working tirelessly to foster good relations between Christians and Jews. Sadly, however, she was never accepted by the Jewish community because of her commitment to Christ and died of cancer in 2002, aged 76.
But we are surely witnessing a new phenomenon now as the scales begin to fall from the eyes of Jewish people everywhere, especially as we approach that wondrous event when “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26) as they look upon the One who was pierced (Zechariah 12:10, Revelation 1:7) and welcome back their true Messiah who, after berating the Pharisees on the eve of his crucifixion, told the crowds: “You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’.” (Matthew 23:39)
Come, Lord Jesus!
1War and Grace by Don Stephens (Evangelical Press, 2005)
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