Minister Warns of Massive Christian Missionary Efforts

A Presbyterian minister with close ties to the Jewish community warned today that Christian missionaries have launched a major effort to convert Jews this summer. The Rev. Paul R. Carlson, pastor of the Glen Morris Presbyterian Church in Ozone Park, Queens, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the effort, known as "Generation Birthday Cake," which began last Sunday, is more of a threat to the Jewish community than was the nationwide "Key ’73" program three years ago.

Carlson, a journalist and author of a book, "O Christian! O Jew!" which explains Judaism to Christians, said the operation involves all the missionary organizations. He said this includes ones such as the old American Board of the Mission to the Jews which seeks to convert Jews out-right and the so-called Hebrew Christians who espouse the "fraud" that Christianity is the true Judaism.

"Operation Birthday Cake" calls for massive street corner missionary drives in every major city in the country, Carlson said. He reported that in Philadelphia 70 Bible students recently completed a course in street corner preaching. Carlson said one of the Hebrew Christian groups, Jews for Jesus, which aims its message at young Jews, has announced it plans a major campaign aimed at Bicentennial crowds in New York, Philadelphia and Washington this weekend. Evidence for this was seen this week in midtown Manhattan where the group was flooding the streets with leaflets.

SEES JEWISH SELF-HATRED

The minister-journalist, who is working on a doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust and teaches a course on the Holocaust at his church, said that from his experience with Hebrew Christians they are either self-hating Jews or Jews whose Judaism ended with their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. He said Jews who are aware of their religious heritage do not convert.

Carlson said he experienced this Jewish self-hatred recently when he was asked to speak on the Holocaust at a conference on "God, the Jew and You," at the First Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Manhattan. He said the Hebrew Christians at the conference attacked Judaism, distorted Jewish history, and made numerous anti-Semitic references. He found himself defending Judaism at the conference.

Carlson noted that many of these Hebrew Christians claim that they come from Orthodox homes whose parents threw them out, a statement he says he cannot believe. He said he thinks they claim to have been Orthodox as a means of pleasing Christians, and most of them know nothing about Judaism.

Carlson believes that much of the money for the missionary effort comes from Christians who are guilty over the Holocaust and are "suckered" into believing that they can help the Jews through converting them. But Carlson said he has always preached that neither conversion nor assimilation works.

DIVISION OF LABOR CITED

Carlson, who calls himself a Zionist, said that one of the problems for the Jewish community is that the very evangelical Christians who seek to convert Jews are also the most pro-Israel. He noted that up to the Six-Day War. Jewish organizations sought to work only with liberal Christians, but it is those liberals who have been anti-Israel during the Six-Day War and later the Yom Kippur War.

Carlson said liberal Christians cannot come to terms with the particularism of Israel. He said that in Germany it was liberal clergymen who joined the Nazis while the conservatives opposed Hitler.

Explaining this, Carlson said a noted Christian scholar recently said that in the eyes of the church the only good Jew was a dead one or a converted one. He said the liberals have opted for killing Jews while the conservatives have sought to convert them. Carlson said that he has no ready answer for the Jewish community to meet the missionary effort. He said that both the church and synagogue in the United States were going through a crisis of faith and it was necessary to bring everybody back to their own religion and have the various faiths work in brotherhood with each other.