Free Republic

For over 30 years, the Peniel Learning Center (PLC) in Tiberias has served children from the local Messianic community, providing a full elementary school curriculum (grades 1 through 6) in an atmosphere that honors the Word of God. As the first and only Hebrew-speaking Messianic elementary school in northern Israel, the Learning Center has always maintained good relations and cooperated with government agencies and the local public schools. The school has an excellent reputation for producing graduates that have gone on to achieve academic success in middle school, high school and beyond – giving testimony to their faith. A local...

An in-depth look at the birth of the modern Messianic Jewish movement when a group of rabbis find Jesus by exploring Scripture. For 1,400 years, between the 4th and 18th centuries, there was not a single Messianic Jewish church or congregation on earth. Then suddenly, in the late 17th century, in a sovereign and supernatural way, the Holy Spirit began to bring Jews back to their Messiah Yeshua (Jesus). It was like a resurrection from the dead! The first event that we know about happened in a small town in southern Poland, Pinczow (near Krakow), around the year 1680. Four...

Christian population in Israel is growing, making the Jewish state the only place in the Middle East in which this is happening. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics released a report on Christmas eve 2022 documenting the status and condition of Christians in Israel. The total number of Christians living in Israel was approximately 183,000, representing 1.9% of Israel’s population. The report went into detail, stating that 75.8% (138,800) of Christians in Israel are Arab, representing 6.9% of the total Arab population in Israel. The majority of Arab Christians live in the Northern District and Haifa District (70.2% and 13.6%, respectively)....

Back in April, the Jewish world was shocked to learn that a Gentile Christian couple was living in an ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem, claiming to be Jews, with the husband serving as a rabbi. In response to that scandal, I wrote an article titled, “As Jewish Followers of Jesus We Deplore Deceptive Techniques.” . As Messianic Jews, we too were shocked to read this report. This is not who we are and this is not how we operate. But now another report has rocked sectors of the Jewish world, especially the religious community in Israel. The anti-missionary group Yad L’Achim...

Find me one nation that has been more devoted to God throughout history than the Jewish people? Find me one nation that has stuck with God despite pogroms, auto-de-fes, expulsions, inquisitions, ghettoization, non-stop persecution, and, ultimately, the Holocaust. Find me a people that continues to honor the Sabbath, put on tefillin, affix mezuzot, keep kosher, marry in the faith, build synagogues and go to mikveh, even after their parents and grandparents were turned into ash at Auschwitz. Find me one nation, like the State of Israel, that honors the complete rights of its 1.5 million Muslim citizens in the heart...

God Himself may have intervened to set the story in motion. And the shocking ramifications could be a sign of nothing less than the end times. So explains Pastor Carl Gallups, who chronicled in book and film “The Rabbi Who Found Messiah” the story of Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, one of Israel’s most revered rabbis, an icon who left a mysterious message after his death that many believe identified Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Gallups recently was a guest on the radio show “Caravan to Midnight,” hosted by John B. Wells. “In 2005 … right around the time of Yom Kippur,...

How would you feel if tomorrow it became illegal to send an email to your friend, inviting them to church? This is the reality that Russian believers have suddenly woken up to, as a result of new anti-terror legislation which came into effect at the end of July, forbidding many forms of evangelism. Ostensibly to combat terrorism, Russia has clamped down hard on evangelism, and made life extremely difficult for our brothers and sisters who want to share the Good News freely there. There has been a great window of opportunity for the gospel to spread since the fall of...

A leading Jewish Messianic group in America has responded to the Vatican's recent claim that Jews do not need to be believers in Jesus Christ to be saved, by saying that the Apostle Paul would have been "horrified" at the suggestion. David Brickner, executive director of Jews for Jesus, said in a statement late last week that the suggestions of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with Jews are : ... egregious, especially coming from an institution which seeks to represent a significant number of Christians in the world." He further pointed out that the document's title, "The Gifts and...

Just wondering if anyone had any definitive facts on this, as I can't seem to find any. If Perry Stone has Rabbis that he works with on spiritual matters, are they all Messianic Jewish Rabbis, some, or none?

Jews do not accept Jesus as the messiah because: Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies. Jesus did not embody the personal qualifications of the Messiah. Biblical verses "referring" to Jesus are mistranslations. Jewish belief is based on national revelation.

Two thousand years of history have shown the Jewish people that Christians are their worst enemies, a Messianic rabbi pointed out. “Jews were told you must convert or be killed. If we ignore the history, we’ll never really understand why it’s so difficult to reach the Jewish people with the Gospel,” Jeff Friedman emphasized. Friedman himself grew up hating Christians. While attending an Orthodox Jewish synagogue regularly in Brooklyn, N.Y., he said he had some brief encounters with Christians and found them offensive, according to Pentecostal Evangel, a publication of the Assemblies of God. It wasn’t until he was in...

Some 15,000 Messianic Jews currently live in Israel, but if you saw one on the street you would almost certainly fail to recognize any difference. They honor Jewish circumcision, bar-mitzvah, and wedding ceremonies, but believe Jesus is the messiah. The small community of Yad Hashmona, near Jerusalem, is home to a number of Messianic-Jewish families. They believe in Jesus – or Yeshua, as they call him – and in the teachings of the New Testament as well as the old. They are Jews in every sense, but for the most part keep this side of their faith to themselves. When...

The Messianic Jew & Charismatic Dispensationalism by Marshall Beeber In the nineteenth century a theological revolution called "Dispensationalism" rightly outlined the "Biblical Historical Perspective", thereby giving mankind a clearer picture of how God has provided and continues to provide salvation to man throughout history.  By acknowledgement of this perspective, an accord between Hebrew Old Covenant and New Covenant prophecy was forged, sweeping away many of the contradictions that divided Christian and Orthodox Jewish prophetic viewpoints.  Dispensationalists became God's instrument of change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,  leading the way in promoting the support of the establishment of the...

In Israel, a resurgence in the number of Jews who believe in Jesus is getting a lot of attention. Many leaders say it's the strongest growth since the time of Jesus and that the Messianic movement could be on the brink of a great revival. "This is the first time where we've seen Israeli society in general being so open to consider who Yeshua is," said Messianic leader Asher Intrater. "This is a real miracle, and there's beginning to be grace and favor with us in the land." Although Jesus and the early disciples were Jewish, for nearly 2,000 years...

CWN.org - In Israel, a resurgence in the number of Jews who believe in Jesus is getting a lot of attention. Many leaders say it's the strongest growth since the time of Jesus and that the Messianic movement could be on the brink of a great revival. "This is the first time where we've seen Israeli society in general being so open to consider who Yeshua is," said Messianic leader Asher Intrater. "This is a real miracle, and there's beginning to be grace and favor with us in the land."

Messianic Jews say they are persecuted in Israel Members of tiny community who believe Jesus was the Messiah complain of threats, harassment and police indifference. 'It is their right according to freedom of religion to maintain their religious lifestyle,' rights group says Associated Press Published: 06.22.08, 22:15 / Israel Jewish Scene Safety pins and screws are still lodged in 15-year-old Ami Ortiz's body three months after he opened a booby-trapped gift basket sent to his family. The explosion severed two toes, damaged his hearing and harmed a promising basketball career. Police say they are still searching for the assailants. But...

JERUSALEM (BP)--The Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that Messianic Jews have the same rights regarding automatic citizenship as Jews who do not believe in Jesus as the Messiah. The case was brought by 12 applicants who had been denied citizenship primarily because they were Jewish believers in Jesus. Most of them had received letters saying they would not receive citizenship because they "commit missionary activity," according to an e-mail circulated by Calev Myers, founder and chief counsel of The Jerusalem Institute of Justice. A clerk at the Ministry of Interior reportedly had told one of the applicants that because...

Recent incidents point to heightened tensions inside Israel between the ultra-Orthodox community and messianic Jews, who believe in Jesus but consider themselves Jewish. In the desert town of Arad, a religious argument recently ended in an attempt by a messianic Jewish man to run over a member of Yad L'Achim, a Haredi anti-missionary organization.

Roy H. Schoeman, was born in a suburb of New York City of “Conservative" Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.  His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry, including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, probably the foremost Conservative Rabbi in the U.S. and his hometown Rabbi growing up;  Rabbi Arthur Green, later the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who was his religion teacher and mentor during high school and early college; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi with whom he lived in Israel for several months. His secular education included a B.Sc....

A number of years ago, when my son was young, we attended a baseball game. Not only was my son a baseball fan, but he was also an avid collector of baseball cards. When we arrived at the ballpark, though, I noticed that he seemed more interested in looking at the pictures of the players on his cards than in watching the ball players on the field. In my astonishment I asked him, "Why are you looking at the pictures, when the real living players are standing right in front of you?" What my son did with baseball cards and...