Jews for Jesus

Big John, a barker outside a San Francisco flesh club called the Garden of Eden, handed out prurient postcards to Saturday-night strollers. Near by, a group of 13 Levi's-clad preachers picketed the club and passed out leaflets which read "Topless! Bottomless! Nothingness!" The picketers looked like typical Jesus freaks, except that four of them were wearing skullcaps and one carried a placard proclaiming "Jesus the Messiah Has Come."

The picketers, who called themselves "Jews for Jesus," are part of the growing, nationwide Jewish wing of the Jesus movement. Whether pamphleteering on the West Coast or professing their beliefs at a Reform temple in suburban New Jersey, the young Jewish Christians are increasingly conspicuous. Their number, while modest compared with the Jesus movement as a whole, is unprecedented among U.S. Jews. U.C.L.A. Campus Rabbi Shlomo Cunin estimates that young Jews are converting to Christianity at the rate of 6,000 to 7,000 a year. California Jewish Christian Evangelist Abe Schneider says he has noted more converts in the past nine months than in the previous 23 years combined.

Though Jewish Christians come from all ages and backgrounds, they are predominantly young spiritual refugees from secularized Jewish homes, liberal synagogues, the drug culture or radical politics. Their most controversial claim is that they are still Jews even though they now accept Jesus as the Messiah promised by the biblical prophets. Many reject the label "convert," and sometimes even "Christian," preferring to call themselves "Messianic" or "completed" Jews. While previous Jewish converts to Evangelicalism became assimilated teetotalers, today's young Jesus Jews often drink wine while observing the Jewish holidays, study Hebrew, and even attend synagogue. Most would agree with Vickie Kress, a New Yorker now attending Bible college in San Francisco: "I feel more Jewish now that I am a Christian."

The Bible is one of the chief lures to conversion. Since Jewish youth usually study it in Hebrew and neglect the prophets, Manhattan Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum describes Christian proselytizing of Jews as "Christian biblical literalism confronting Jewish biblical illiteracy." Evangelicals often teach that the return of the Jews to Israel and the founding of a modern state there were foretold by the prophets, and that the 1967 capture of the Old City of Jerusalem began the fulfillment of Jesus' prediction in Luke 21: 24-27 about his Second Coming.

Jewish Christians are nothing new, of course. A movement bumper sticker recalls that "Jesus Was Raised in a Kosher Home." The New Testament church began with Jews--although they soon found themselves at odds both with the majority of their people, who refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and with Gentile Christians, who eschewed Jewish law. What is new about the Jesus Jews, besides their numbers, is the degree of their evangelistic.fervor. In an attempt to echo that fervor, the long-established American Board of Missions to the Jews has run full-page newspaper ads crowing about the number of Jews "wearing 'that smile' nowadays!" Last week New York Rabbi William Berkowitz took his own ad headed "Wipe That Smile Off," saying that there is such vast spiritual poverty among both Jews and Christians that each group should concentrate on missions to its own people.

Traditionally, Judaism has taken a stern view of persons who desert the Jewish community for another faith. Ruling on three cases of Christian conversion, the Massachusetts rabbinical court decreed in March that a Jew who "joins the so-called Hebrew-Christians movement" has "betrayed his people" and has no right to a Jewish marriage or burial. The American Jewish Committee last month sent community leaders a more moderate memo, supporting freedom of conscience but warning that the surge of Christian evangelism among Jews is becoming a major interreligious problem. West Coast militants, for their part, have been breaking up Jewish Christian meetings.

Many Jews find a moral in the Jesus movement. The American Jewish Committee memo asked whether the conversions are not a "judgment" on Judaism's own lack of appeal to youth. One anxious rabbi in New Jersey plans to start teaching a Bible class. Rabbi Alexander Schindler, vice president of Reform Judaism's synagogue union, has concluded that liberal Western faiths have been "too hyperrational. Our young people want a religion which sets the soul on fire."

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