January 5, 2009
ARIEL, West Bank (RNS) -- After their teenage son was nearly killed last year by a bomb disguised as a holiday gift basket, few people were as eager for Ya'acov Teitel to see justice as Leah and David Ortiz.
Teitel, an Orthodox Jewish loner who confessed to placing the package in the family's stairwell said he targeted the Ortiz family because they are Messianic Jews -- Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
"We want justice, not revenge," said Leah Ortiz, who has lived in this religiously mixed city of 30,000 since the late 1980s. "This happened because Teitel had hate in his heart. He needs to be in prison."
The attack, which left 15-year-old Ami with shrapnel wounds and burns over much of his body, has highlighted the vulnerability facing Israel's small and increasingly beleaguered Messianic Jewish community.
Community members say the decades-old harassment has intensified in recent years, as ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups dedicated to stopping missionary activity have grown stronger and more confident.
Anti-missionary activists hold protests outside Messianic places of worship and post photos and the addresses of believers on lampposts.
They tell the Ministry of the Interior that Messianic Jews are converts to Christianity, something that would make them ineligible to immigrate to Israel.
Although Israeli law permits missionary activity -- provided the evangelizer does not offer any material incentive to a potential convert -- the persecution and forced conversion of countless Jews for generations has made Jews extremely wary of proselytizing.
Messianic Jews, who publish and distribute the New Testament in Hebrew, say they are eager to share the "good news" with anyone willing to listen, but insist that they do so within the parameters of the law.
Aaron Rubin, who heads the anti-missionary department at Yad L'Achim, Israel's leading anti-Messianic organization, insists that Messianic Jews lure unsuspecting Jews by speaking Hebrew and quoting Jewish texts.
"They lie. They try to convert people but say they're not Christians. They're fundamentalist Christians who call themselves Jews," Rubin asserts.
Several of Israel's estimated 100 Messianic Jewish congregations are reporting an unprecedented level of harassment:
-- In the southern cities of Beersheva and Arad, fervently Orthodox Jews regularly protest outside Messianic Jewish congregations and the homes of worshippers. A chess club run by one of the congregations was burned to the ground.
-- When ultra-Orthodox Jews in central Ashdod learned that Israel and Pnina Comforti are Messianic believers, they convinced local rabbinical authorities to revoke the all-important kosher certification for the couple's bakery. Despite an order from Israel's Supreme Court last June, the rabbis continue to refuse to recognize the bakery as kosher.
-- In early December, two ultra-Orthodox men were arrested for torching the car of the Levine family, Messianic Jews who live in the northern town of Beit Shean. Activists armed with a megaphone go around town, telling residents the Levines are Christian missionaries who bribe children to convert to Christianity.
Barry Segal, a Messianic leader who co-founded the Joseph's Storehouse Humanitarian Aid Center with his wife outside Jerusalem, attributes the recent rash of high-profile incidents to his movement's growing popularity.
"The number of believers in Israel was roughly 300 in 1981, and today it's over 12,000," he said. "I'm talking about those of us who are Jewish born, who were married in Jewish weddings."
Thousands more Israelis, primarily Russian and Ethiopian immigrants whose Jewish status is questionable, combine Jewish and Christian ritual in their daily lives.
"In times past, the harassment mostly consisted of mail tampering and phone calls with vicious intent," Segal said. But in recent years, "there has been a rising tide from harassment into violent acts."
