That Jews For Jesus proselytizes Jews is well-known, but local and national Jewish activists are particularly galled at the organization’s use of the Holocaust and people saying they are Holocaust survivors in its recent campaign.
“This is the big time,” said Scott Hillman, director of education for Jews For Judaism, a Baltimore-based organization dedicated to countering missionaries. “They are using the survivor piece as a part of a campaign.”
This summer’s Jews For Jesus campaign, called “Behold Your God,” has targeted 65 cities worldwide with Jewish populations over 25,000. The campaign reached Milwaukee on June 29 and is slated to continue through the middle of this month.
Many area Jews, about 20,000, were first alerted to the campaign after receiving a flyer in the mail. It showed a photo of an elderly woman under which were the words: “Before you dismiss my belief you should hear my story.”
There were — perhaps still are — four billboards in the Milwaukee area featuring the same person, identified as Holocaust survivor Marion Parkhurst.
“They want you to send for a video about Holocaust survivors that have become believers in Yeshua [Hebrew for Jesus],” said Hillman. “They won’t use the word Jesus.”
Other than calling the entire concept of “Jews for Jesus” an “oxymoron,” Marty Katz, president of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, said the organization has “used the Holocaust in the past [to proselytize Jews], but this is the first time they have used an image of a senior citizen survivor. How low can a person go?”
Rabbi Israel Shmotkin, director of Lubavitch of Wisconsin, shared Katz’s sentiments. “It is outrageous to … use these martyrs. [I]t is a desecration of their memory, what they stood for and it is simply inhuman,” Shmotkin said.
Dean of the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies Rabbi Mendel Senderovic mused about the irony of using Holocaust survivors who have adopted Christianity when centuries of anti-Jewish Christian teachings may have helped prepare the ground for a Holocaust to occur. He said using actual Holocaust survivors in the campaign was “appalling.”
Rabbi Shlomo Pontos, religious services coordinator for the Jewish Home and Care Center and a child of Holocaust survivors, said, “To use Holocaust survivors to promote the belief of Jesus as the messiah is for me especially offensive.”
But Susan Perlman, associate executive director for Jews For Jesus, based in San Francisco, does not believe using Holocaust survivors to proselytize Jews is offensive.
“They [Jews For Jesus Holocaust survivors] have just as much a right to tell their story as any other Jew,” said Perlman. “We feel that as they [advance] in years we want to help them tell their story.”
In addition to the offensiveness of the proselytizing campaign in general and its demeaning of Judaism as a legitimate religion, Paula Simon, MJCCR executive director, found particularly upsetting the campaign’s implication that “there was some meaning to [Parkhurst’s] survival and the meaning was that she would either find Jesus or found Jesus.”
Betty Chrustowski, a member of the Generation After, an organization of children of Holocaust survivors, thought any implications that Jews died in the Holocaust for lack of faith in Jesus were “ridiculous,” adding, “My Dad, who is no longer here, would have been insulted and upset by that.”
Her mother, Rose Chrustowski, said the campaign upset her. “It is something unbelievable and I find it offensive.” But she added, “Everybody has a right to express themselves.” Chrustowski also noted that “priests and nuns” were killed by the Nazis “because they believed in their god.”
If anything, she said it was her faith in Judaism that helped her to survive. “In the worst times when we were [in concentration camps] we knew approximately when holidays were and we still fasted and [practiced] as Jews.”
Perlman vehemently denied charges Jews For Jesus asserted or meant to imply that Jews died in the Holocaust for lack of faith in Jesus or survived because of faith in Jesus.
She maintained, however, that “individuals in the video each expressed in their own words and terms what believing in Jesus came to mean to them.”
But Sandra Hoffman, president of the Generation After and co-chair of the Holocaust Resource Center, a program of the Coalition for Jewish Learning of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, was dubious about Perlman’s assertions.
She said using Holocaust survivors for missionary purposes was “a real hook that would get attention. I think it implies — whether [Jews For Jesus] agrees or not — that had Jews believed in Christ they might not have died.”
Hoffman was more concerned with Jewish education, saying if Jews are educated about their faith and culture, groups like Jews For Jesus “won’t make any impact on them.”
In a statement Friday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Marcus White, executive director of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, of which MJCCR is a member, said, “We hope that all faith traditions are respectful of other faith traditions, and while we understand that in some traditions there is an obligation to help spread the word, it’s a little troubling to see Christians using Judaism as a vehicle for proselytizing.”
The local campaign is being run from an office at 5464 N. Port Washington Rd. in Glendale. Mark Landrum, a campaign worker reached by telephone there, said that although the office was temporary, the “positiveness” of the campaign could change its status.
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