Study Shows ‘moonies’ Fail to Make Headway Among Jewish College Youth

Jewish college students are “untouched by and indifferent to” the heavily financed missionary efforts of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, a B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations’ survey reported this week. The Hillel findings, based on a poll of its campus directors on 75 major campuses, disputed claims of “extensive support” among Jewish youth for the controversial Korean evangelist.

Sixty of the Hillel directors reported that proselytizing and other activities by Moon followers amounted to “absolutely nothing” on their respective campuses. The principal exceptions were a few schools in the New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Berkeley-San Francisco urban areas “where the Moon people have expended enormous amounts of energy and resources,” according to Rabbi Samuel Z. Fishman, Hillel’s assistant national director, who conducted the survey.

“Despite the more intensive Unification Church missionizing at these schools, the results “have been marginal,” Fishman said. The Hillel survey, released during the midwinter meeting of B’nai B’rith’s board of governors, the organization’s highest policy body, discounted publicized estimates of widespread Moon conversions, 45 percent of them purportedly former Jews. Such claims. Fishman said, were unsubstantiated and in keeping with the practice of missionary groups to “exaggerate their successes.”

He said that Jewish fears of Moon proselytizing were “somewhat reminiscent” of the Key ’73 and Jews for Jesus campaigns, “each of which was supposed to have made serious penetrations among Jewish youth. But a widely-reported claim that Jews for Jesus was winning six-to-seven-thousand converts a year proved groundless,” he said.