Chabad Enlists Ukrainians to Halt Missionary Festival

Hear O Israel Ministries has been a big hit in the former Soviet Union. Each year, it hold several extravaganzas of Messianic Jewish song and dance in the biggest stadiums in the biggest cities – from Moscow to Odessa, from St. Petersburg to Minsk.

Since he began running the festivals three years ago, Hear O Israel’s leader, an American Jew-turned-evangelical Christian named Jonathan Bernis, claims to have converted 20,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to believe in Jesus.

And no one from the former Soviet Union’s organized Jewish communities has been able to stop him. Until now.

In Kharkov, Ukraine, a lone Lubavitch rabbi named Moshe Moskowitz, with the help of Ukrainian officials and the American Jewish anti-missionary groups Jews for Judaism, this month managed to halt Bernis’ plans to hold a three-day festival.

Of Kharkov’s approximately 2 million people, 50,000 are Jews.

The festivals present extravagant stage shows. A videotape of the festival held in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium in May 1994 shows 13,000 people in the arena sitting in rapt attention as Bernis tell them: “We’re here to share with you in music and dance and word the joy you can feel through a personal relationship with God and his Messiah.”

After getting the crowd into the spirit with a couple of hours of Messianic Jewish performances and group singing, he asks everyone in attendance to accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Each attendee gets a Russian-language copy of the Christian Bible written specifically for a Jewish audience, that is, with the Hebrew word for savior, Yehoshua, instead of Jesus.

The Jews of the former Soviet Union, many of whom know little about Judaism other than the fact that they are Jewish, do not know Messianic Judaism for what it truly is: evangelical Christianity adorned with Jewish symbols, said Mark Powers, national director of Jews for Judaism.

In early May, Bernis and a group from his Rochester, N.Y.-based ministry, Hear O Israel, set up shop in Kharkov with an office and a publicity blitz, Rabbi Levi Raices, Kharkov’s other Lubavitch emissary, said in an interview from Los Angeles, where he and his wife had gone to give birth to their third child.

The ministry spends more than $300,000 on each festival, according to Powers. The money is raised from Messianic Jewish congregations in the United States.

The ministry brings over between 100 and 300 volunteer missionaries from North America, each of whom pays more than $1,500 to Hear O Israel to travel to the former Soviet Union to evangelize “the Lost Sheep of Israel,” as a letter from Bernis to interested volunteers puts it.

Hear O Israel had rented out Kharkov’s largest venue, the Stadium Metalist, which seats 30,000 people, and planned to fill it with different people each of the festival’s three nights. The city was abuzz in anticipation of the festival, Raices said. Hear O Israel put up posters featuring a large Star of David and the words “Free Festival with Jewish Song and Dance” on the biggest billboards in town and in every subway car, the rabbi said.

They had placed ads on local television and radio stations, and in each of the city’s five main newspapers. “Of course the whole city was talking about it,” said Raices.

“Many Jews in Kharkov didn’t really comprehend the difference between them and us, and thought that we [at Chabad] were doing it,” he said.

Alarmed at tactics that he feared would deceive many of Kharkov’s Jews, Chabad’s Moskowitz began writing to every city government official he could find, and gave them documentation about Hear O Israel’s true nature. That information was supplied by Jews for Judaism. The government agreed that Hear O Israel was not really Jewish, and ordered it to stop its activities because it was not registered as an officially recognized religion.

At a Hear O Israel news conference 10 days before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, when the festival was scheduled to be held, a government official informed the ministry of its decision. Moskowitz had slipped in to the news conference and, since the local reporters knew him, they asked him what he thought of the situation.

When he told them that Hear O Israel is not Jewish at all, ministry officials angrily ordered him to leave the premises and had someone show him the door, according to Raices.

“This was being filmed, so on every TV station they were talking about it – that they threw out the rabbi,” Raices said. “A day or two later one of the papers wrote about it and asked how could they claim to be a Jewish organization if they threw out the rabbi.”

“That’s the best [public relations] we could have hoped for,” he said.

Even so, it does not seem as though the Jewish community will be able to stop Bernis for long. “These are clearly the largest missionizing attempts by any group in the former Soviet Union,” said Jews for Judaism’s Powers. “In terms of sheet one-shot manpower, they’re larger than what the Jewish community has mustered.”

No one at the ministry’s Rochester office would answer questions its activities.