Just Jew It

An artist's rendition of messianic Judaism. Image used with permission of Lori's Web Design.

At 11:30 on a Wednesday night, Alexander Lakshin's spartan office in the outskirts of Moscow looks like Central Command. Hanging on the wall, a large map of the former Soviet Union littered with red pins shows where the enemy is clustered. The red markers are heavily concentrated in Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and St. Petersburg. They crop up in Kazakhastan and other parts of Central Asia and extend all the way east to the territory just above Japan.

Dressed in a navy suit and tie, he seems energetic despite the late hour, darting up from the large, gray conference table to pop in a videotape that illustrates his adversaries' strategies.

"The problem is, they use deceptive tactics," he says, cueing the tape.

Perhaps he missed his calling as a general, but as president of Magen, which means shield in Hebrew, Lakshin spends his days and many nights combating what some have termed the Silent Holocaust: the conversion of Jews to Christianity.

For the last 10 years, messianic congregations like Jews for Jesus and Jewish Voice have targeted the roughly two million Jews of the former Soviet Union as potential converts to Christianity. Wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls, they approach people at metro stations near synagogues carrying pamphlets emblazoned with Stars of David. They hold Shabbat services in churches, rented concert halls or movie theaters, where they recite Hebrew prayers and bring out a Torah. They have Jewish festivals and concerts in sports stadiums, where they lead crowds of thousands in familiar Jewish songs like Hava Nagila before performing a mass baptism.

When Christianity is introduced, it's Yeshua, not Jesus, matzo, not a communion wafer and a tree, not a cross. To many Russian Jews, who were denied religious education for four generations under Communism, Messianic Judaism looks like the real thing.

Synagogues and Jewish schools have reopened during the last decade as well as kosher meat markets, the signs of a sure religious revival in the former Soviet Union. But Russia's Jewish community remains deeply scarred by the official repression of religion under the Soviet regime. For decades, those who dared attend synagogue had to do so in secret; most did not. Cut off from their religious heritage, the Jews of Russia mostly dissappeared into a cultural void in large and small ways.

Baking kosher matzo was against the law in Leningrad and other major cities. Some Jews chose to become vegetarians because kosher meat was not available, but most found assimilation to be the safest and easiest alternative. As a result, today's Russian Jews are typically unfamiliar with Jewish texts and traditions.

"Ninety-nine percent of Russian Jews have no religious education," Lakshin said. "This is still the heritage of 70 years of communism. That's why missionaries believe Russian Jews to be easy targets."

Jews for Jesus, which was founded in 1970 by Baptist Minister Martin Rosen, who later became Moishe Rosen, began to dispatch missionaries to Russian cities with large Jewish populations in the early '90s. In 1999, the growth of Russia's messianic communities became a cause of concern for Berel Lazar, Russia's chief Rabbi and a long time friend of Lakshin's, who summoned him to head Magen, a counter-missionary organization funded by the American philanthropist George Rohr.

Though it is hard to assess the actual number of converts, Lakshin calculates that tens of thousands of Jews in the former Soviet Union practice Messianic Judaism. By some estimates, there are 200 or more messianic congregations with memberships ranging from 20 to 2,000.

For Lazar and Lakshin, the main task is to educate Russian Jews about the people who might try to convert them.

"Jews for Jesus portray themselves as the Jewish community of Russia. They prey on Jews who know nothing about Judaism," said Lazar, who later compared Jews for Jesus' tactics to marketing Pepsi as Coke.

Missionaries say they are simply giving Jews a choice to practice Jesus -centered Judaism.

"The aim of the mission is to preserve Jewish traditions and enliven them by the Gospels," Inna Popovitch, a Christian woman who works as an office administrator in the Moscow headquarters of Jews for Jesus, said through a translator. "They become Christians, but they are Jews by nationality. They make their own choice."

Judaism is still regarded by many in Russia as a cultural rather than a religious identity. In Soviet times, "Jewish" was listed under nationality on the internal passports of Jews.

Igor Barbanel, the head of Jews for Jesus in Russia, said he considers himself a double Jew. Sitting behind his desk in the attic of a brick church in the city's industrial suburbs, he described how he came to Christianity through messianic Judaism.

Like many Soviet-era Jews, his parents were atheists and observed only major holidays like Passover and Yom Kippur. In 1991, he started receiving literature from Jews for Jesus; three years later, he and his wife attended Shabbat services at a messianic church. At the service, someone read a passage from the gospel of Luke. Barbanel said he decided then that as a Jew, he had to serve God as a missionary.

"I'm still a Jew," said the former boxer, casually touching a copy of the Bible adorned with the Star of David lying on his desk. "I have my tradition still, like a Russian can be come an American. The real Judaism is believing in Jesus."

Now, having run the Jews for Jesus offices in Odessa and Dnetropetrovsk in the Ukraine, Barbanel is working to bring more Russian Jews to Jesus. He insists his goal is not conversion. Though Barbanel and his family attend a Baptist Church on Sundays and consider themselves Christians, they can still be Jewish, he said.

Many, however, are sceptical of a hybrid religion that dresses itself in Jewish symbolism but preaches the gospel.

Lakshin said he is often asked why he does not oppose the Russian Orthodox Church, which has also gained a number of Jewish converts over the years.

"I tell them that no Jew who converts to Russian Orthodoxy thinks he is still going to the synagogue," he said.

To demonstrate what he calls the deceptive techniques of messianic groups, Lakshin plays a videotape of a 1993 Jewish festival in St. Petersburg. A round American man with a yarmulke covering his bald head addresses a crowd of 4,000 people jammed into a dark stadium.

"We're not here to make you believe anything," he tells the crowd in English as a Russian man translates. "We don't want you to change your religion. We're Jews who have accepted Jesus, and we call him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua."

The man, Jonathan Bernis, the head of Jewish Voice, asks members of the crowd to bow their heads as he blesses them with a Hebrew prayer. Then he asks them to repeat after him. "I believe that Yeshua is my messiah and that he died for my sins," he says. His words are echoed by a chorus of thousands, mumbling in Russian.

For three consecutive nights, the Jewish festival held in St. Petersburg drew between 3,000 and 4,000 people.

Despite counter-missionary efforts, thousands of Russian Jews continue to be converted, said Yitzchak Geyer, who heads a non-profit counter-missionary organization called Derech Emet or the way of truth in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where messianic communities have sprung up to attract the neighborhood's many Russian immigrants.

"Unlike organizations like Jews for Jesus who are sponsored by evangelical missionary groups in the Bible belt and receive millions of dollars a year, we are a small organization," Geyer said. "Obviously, we cannot have the impact we would want."

With their surplus of funds, Jews for Jesus uses the same advertising company as Nike. Their most recent advertising campaign featured the slogan: "Be more Jewish- Believe in Jesus."

But catchy slogans and glossy brochures may never persuade those who consider the theological differences between Judaism and Christianity to be too great. Lakshin sums up the difference with a catchy slogan of his own:

"Jews for Jesus is like vegetarians for steak."

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